LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 



Chap. Copyright No. 



' ""Pi"a )'P'lg 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



I 



PURCELKS "MANNING" REFUTED. 

LIFE 

OF 

CARDINAL MANNING 

WITH 

A CKITICAL EXAMINATION 

OF 

E. S. PUEOELL'S MISTAKES. 

BY 
FRANCIS DE PRESSENSE 

A FEENCH PEOTESTANT. 

TRANSLATED BY 
FRANCIS T. FUREY, A. M. 




PHILADELPHIA : 
JOHN JOS. McYEY. 

1897. 



n,^?^^^-^^ 



Thb Ijbeary 
of cokgrms 

WASHmOTON 






Copyright, 1896, 

BY 

JOHN J. McVEY. 



/Z' ■» 



;;// 






TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE. 



No biography published in recent times has attracted 
so much attention as that of Cardinal Manning by E. S. 
Purcell. It has made a sensation such as no other 
work of its kind has caused, not even Froude's 
''Carlyle," with which it has so often been compared. 
Both are alike in the injudicious use each author has 
made of the materials at his disposal, but there the 
similarity ends; for while Froude succeeded in unin- 
tentionally ruining his hero's reputation, Purcell has 
only aided in making the great Enghsh Cardinal's 
nobility of character the better known through the 
almost innumerable refutations that he has called forth. 
And it is not only Catholic writers who have taken him 
to task; for Protestant defenders of Manning against 
his biographer have been even more numerous than 
they, and sometimes even warmer in their advocacy. 

Nor have the assailants of Mr. Purcell because of what 
Mr. Stead has happily described as his "attempt on 
the life of Cardinal Manning, ' ' been confined to Eng- 
land or the English-speaking world. Deep interest in 
the subject has also been taken by continental writers, 
so deep indeed that at least in one instance it has been 
discussed far more elaborately than by any writer in 

(3) 



translator's preface. 



English. And this has been done, too, by a French- 
man who is a Protestant, the son of a Calvinist min- 
ister. It is his work that is given here in an Enghsh 
dress, with the hope that it may make the true Man- 
ning better known. No Catholic could write more 
sympathetically of the subject than does M. de Pres- 
sense, who, even in his comments on religious ques- 
tions, says very little, almost nothing indeed, to which 
a Catholic can take exception; while his book presents 
the advantage of being not only a refutation, but at the 
same time a biography as well. Perhaps the only 
serious fault that one can find with him is his apparent 
disparagement of Newman when he contrasts the char- 
acters of the two great princes of the Church. This, 
however, does not detract from the value of his work, 
which well deserves to retain a permanent place in 
biographical literature. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

Translator's Preface 3 

PART FIRST. 
Introductory 7 

PART SECOND. 
Manning as a Protestant 70 

PART THIRD. 

Manning as a Catholic 133 

Alphabetical Index 205 

(5) 



PART FIRST. 



INTRODUCTORY. 



For the second and third parts of this work, written 
for a periodical publication,* no other ambition was 
entertained than to trace, in a necessarily imperfect 
abridgment, a slight sketch of one of the most exalted 
and most noble Christian personages that this centnr}^ 
has presented to us. In reproducing them in a more 
durable form, without making any change in them, I 
am no doubt partly obeying too indulgent advice and 
solicitations too flattering; but I wanted especially not 
to leave unanswered certain criticisms occasioned by 
those modest articles. 

If I had consulted only my own desire, and, I may 
add, my own interest, it would have been much better, 
in all probability, not to have sought to prolong the 
naturally ephemeral existence of a production altogether 
incidental. When one has long entertained the hope 
of one day writing the history of a great religious move- 
ment, the best means of furnishing a prelude to the 
carrying out of this project is not, undoubtedly, to offer 

* They appeared originally in the Revue des Deux Mondes of May 
1 and May 15, 1896, with the title: "Manning. — I. * Les Annces 
Protcstantes.' — II. * Les Annees Catholiques.' " 

(V) 



8 purcell's ''manning" refuted. 

to the public a hasty and incomplete sketch. No one 
realizes more than I do that defects and omissions dis- 
figure the present study — imperfections perhaps neces- 
sarily entailed by the narrow compass or summary 
character of the narrative — and some also that it would 
have been easy for me to avoid. I do not pretend to 
give here a full-length portrait of Cardinal Manning, 
nor especially a portrait that is worthy in every respect 
of that great original. Very much less have I enter- 
tained the illusion of presenting an account, or even an 
outline, of the origin and progress of Anglo-Catholicism. 
In this essay, as in all those of a biographical nature, 
there is, if I may venture to say so, at the same time 
more and less than in a chapter of history — less, be- 
cause there is question only of a single individual and 
not of a great party or rather of a whole generation; 
more, nevertheless, because there is nothing like the 
infinite complexity and inexhaustible wealth of a man's 
soul, and because that is precisely what it has been 
proposed to depict. The very kindly feelings that have 
been aroused by the publication of these pages, and that 
have encouraged me, perhaps imprudently, to bring 
them out in a new form, are, I feel certain, due entirely 
to whatever there is in Cardinal Manning's personality 
that is human, pathetic, emotional and dramatic. As 
regards the occasional severe criticisms and bitter re- 
bukes that have been unsparingly heaped upon me, 
they have been evidently due especially to my ability 
being too obviously insufficient for me to do full justice 
to this great subject. I would not dare to assert, how- 
ever, that there are not in them traces of that narrow- 



INTRODUCTORY. 9 

ness of mind and of heart, and of those sectarian preju- 
dices, which seem to me to be much more out of place 
here than anywhere else. 

Assuredly, in paying a homage that I wanted to 
make as striking as possible to one of the men who, 
having gone out from the pale of Protestantism, have 
contributed most to the restoration of Catholicism as a 
spiritual power and to the triumph of the doctrines 
called Ultramontane, I was not ignorant either of what 
I was doing or of what I ought to expect. Nothing 
could appear more natural to me, more legitimate even, 
than the surprise or even irritation of certain minds. 
I had foreseen certain objections, nay, even certain pro- 
tests in the name of the principles of the Reformation. 

If a Protestant critic, without entering into a detailed 
examination of the facts on which I thought I could 
base my admiration, my respect, my veneration for 
Cardinal Manning, had remained satisfied with asking 
me, by way of preliminary inquiry, how I thought of 
reconciling this condition of soul with the profession of 
Protestantism; if another, giving an interpretation difr 
ferent from mine to the known documents or app-ealing 
to new ones, had disputed, with the evidence in hand, 
my method of relating and passing judgment upon the 
events of Manning's inner and outer life; if a third, 
setting the biography aside altogether, had placed side 
by side the principles that are explicitly or implicitly 
laid down in these pages, the prejudices that they be- 
tray, the sympathies or antipathies that they unveil, 
the judgments that they pass on the men and things of 
both denominations, in order to discuss and refute them; 



10 purcell's ''manning" refuted. 

if either, in fine, bringing all these data together, 
drawing their logical conclusions from these premises, 
had been pleased to contrast with and oppose to the 
positive assertions and involuntary avowals that he 
thought he found in my articles, in regard to my opin- 
ions on the most serious subjects, what he thought he 
knew of my acknowledged convictions or even of my 
inmost feeling, I might have been able to regret certain 
acts of injustice, to deplore certain failures in tact, to 
dispute certain deductions, to combat certain argu- 
ments, nay even to disallow certain jurisdictions; it 
would have been impossible for me to complain of a 
mode of controversy so respectful of an adversary's 
conscience. 

There might have been error on one side or on the 
other, — perhaps on both at one and the same time; 
what would have been on neither would be the spirit of 
contention and quibbling, the implicit assertion of 
moral superiority, the sickly need of excommunication. 
God forbid that I be such an ingrate as to pretend that 
I have met with none but ill-natured disputants. How 
shall I forget the exquisite delicacy, the discreet solici- 
tude of men in whom I was accustomed to venerate 
authentic witnesses in favor of living Christianity, and 
who, compelled by their conscience to point out errors, 
in their estimation fatal, have done so with a modera- 
tion, a patience, a breadth, a charity in a word, for 
which I am ever grateful to them ? I could name pub- 
licists, religious writers, ever so far from approving of 
my judgments, who, however, have not thought it 
their duty — or their right — to hurl the thunderbolts of 



INTRODUCTORY. 11 

the major excommunication, to condemn in a lump 
and without appeal, to feign superior intelligence on 
questions of fact or of persons, in which the elements of 
an independent opinion were wanting to them; in fine, 
to give to the public, as news worthy of credence, gra- 
tuitous inventions springing from their brain and from 
it only. 

Articles like that of the Journal Religieux de la Suisse 
Romande show clearly that there is a method of contro- 
versy in which fidelity most uncompromising to the 
principles of Protestantism by no means excludes Chris- 
tian charit3^ There is, then, a means of speaking one's 
thoughts frankly, but also with perfect courtesy. It is 
not necessary, then, that in such a case discussion 
should degenerate, in its subordinate development, into 
a pitiful homily or a virulent demand. I know that in 
this respect there is in him who has signed these lines 
an hereditary tradition of fairness, civility and justice; 
we cannot require such generous methods of every one. 

Why should it be, however, that I find myself com- 
pelled to refer to attacks directed in so different a spirit ? 
One begins by hiding his face at the mere spectacle of 
the scandal given by a Protestant by birth speaking 
sympatheticall}^, admiringly, of a pervert from Protest- 
antism. He is indignant at the effrontery of a writer 
who dares to find fault with the manner of writing 
history adopted by Mr. Purcell, who is suddenly pro- 
moted to the rank of a serious author drawing upon 
original sources. According to him, there is intolerable 
lack of regard for consistency and even of good faith in 
taking from the book of Cardinal IManning's self- 



12 purcell's "manning" refuted. 

appointed biographer the proofs of the innumerable 
errors of fact and of the incomparably more gross and 
more culpable errors of judgment committed by this 
singular depictor, who seems to have no dearer pleasure 
than to disfigure the features and to demean the expres- 
sion of his subject. 

Critics who probably have not taken the trouble to 
read, and especially to study minutely the sixteen 
hundred pages of Mr. Purcell's massive work, do not 
admit that one has the right to pass severe judgment 
on a book in which a systematic malevolence towards 
one of the great men of modern Catholicism has served 
with them as a sufficient recommendation. Mr. Pur- 
cell's two volumes are full of insinuations, accusations 
and condemnations against Cardinal Manning; that suf- 
fices: they are the work of a master hand; they must be 
accepted as gospel truth, and to point out gross errors, 
monstrous contradictions, stupefying evidences of ignor- 
once, constant falsification of dates, inaccurate quota- 
tions, mutilated documents, disorder in thought, 
vulgarity in style, and, worse than all that, a spirit of 
disparagement and of calumny that make of this w^ork 
a sad monument of all that a biography worthy of this 
name ought not to be, is to expose oneself to being 
taxed with prejudice in favor of the Church of Rome 
and with treason against the Pvcformation. 

But this is not all. Such a defender of Protestant 
orthodoxy goes farther. Not satisfied with rummaging 
with a far from light hand in the most secret and most 
sacred recesses of a man's conscience, our journalist 
arrogates to himself the attributes of a prophet. Offici- 



INTRODUCTORY. Id 

ally, as if he could have no doubt of it, or rather as if 
he had received an express mandate about it, he an- 
nounces as an accomplished fact a conversion or an 
abjuration, which is quite simply the logical conclusion 
which it has pleased him to draw from the premises 
that he has laid down. He is so sure of his fact that 
he himself comments on the news that he has just 
given, and in which he would have indeed liked, as he 
declares in no uncertain terms, to place no confidence. 

And then it is a little play that begins. 

The information thus put in circulation is taken up 
by the myriad echoes of publicity. After the religious 
it is the turn of the secular, and then even of the boule- 
vard press. Comments go their way. Each new stage 
in the flight of this canard gives it an increase of vi- 
tahty. Ere long, those even who have taken the lib- 
erty of thus playing wdth your name have a grievance 
against you. Of their certain knowledge and full 
power it has pleased them to attribute to you an act 
too important and touching too closely on the domain 
of conscience for it not to have been necessary to verify 
its authenticity, twice rather than once, before launch- 
ing the assertion of it. They have a grudge against you 
for the silence that you keep. They reproach you 
with lack of respect for the public if you decline the 
arbitrary jurisdiction of the third or of the fourth. 
They summon you to answer questions that they have 
not the right to put to you. If you do not consent to 
send back the ball they will do you up handsomely. 
Should you have the weakness to entertain any out-of- 
date prejudice against the violation of a certain modesty 



14 purcell's "manning" refuted. 

of soul; should you positively refuse to bring out into 
the broad daylight of publicity, not your actions, your 
words, or your very thoughts, but the innermost con- 
flict and most secret anguish of your soul, they will 
show you clearly that you are wrong and that the press 
has the right to learn everything, or rather, to know 
everything. 

Thus old-time methods are perpetuated while adapt- 
ing themselves to the mildness of our present manners. 
Thank God, there is no longer a tribunal of the Inquisi- 
tion; but are we quite sure that some of its methods do 
not survive and that they are not occasionally applied 
in the name and to the advantage of the religion of free 
examination, of individualism and of freedom of con- 
science ? Nor is it amiss to note that there is some- 
thing rather pointed in seeing oneself excommunicated 
by Geneva — I mean, put outside the communion of the 
visible Church by its champions by reason of their 
office, under the pretext of a too obvious predilection 
for the visible Church. The paradox would be quite 
agreeable if there was question here only of making 
merry over the inconsistencies of one's judges. 

Unfortunately, these controversies do not fail to have 
their echo outside, in many upright hearts and simple 
minds. An equanimity of soul bordering very closely 
on the indifference of egoism would be necessary in 
order to have recourse against all this noise only to ab- 
solute silence. By saying nothing one also risks be- 
coming an object of scandal. This is why I thought it 
my duty to repel here attacks to which, if there was 
question only of myself, I would not perhaps have 



INTRODUCTORY. 15 

thought of answering. Certainly, I have taken no ac- 
count of those anonymous enthusiasts of a ;pure and 
spotless religion who, forgetting to attach their signatures, 
have leveled at me a broadside of pious insults. AVith 
these anonymous writers I certainly do not confound 
the champions of the Gospel who arrogate to themselves 
the right of throwing your most sacred memories in 
your face and of bringing your filial affection into ques- 
tion because of differences of opinion; but I will be al- 
lowed to answer them with some emotion. 

In truth, what then do they know of the inheritance 
of true liberalism, of breadth of view in connection 
with faith, left to me by my father, Edmond de Pres- 
sense — they who are pleased to invoke and to use 
against me the memory of him who was formerly called 
the Protestant Montalembert ? Assuredly I know better 
than they the inviolable and inflexible fidelity that he, 
until the end, devoted to the Church of his choice — how 
much that Christianity which upheld him in a cruel 
agony of eighteen months was thoroughly penetrated 
with the spirit of individualistic Protestantism — ^to what 
point, in those last months in which he was called upon 
to live what he had believed the principles of his pre- 
ferred master, Alexandre Vinet, assumed in his estima- 
tion a degree of fresh evidence — with what severity even 
he believed he ought to judge certain recent develop- 
ments of Catholicism. 

Never did the idea even occur to me of invoking 
certain phrases inadvertently improvised by him, 
which others have not had the same scruples about 
using and which seemed to tend to predicting the 



16 purcell's "manning" refuted. 

failure of the Reformation in France. I do not dream 
of recalling the virulent attacks occasioned against the 
intrepid champion of liberty of conscience by the energy 
of his attitude in the Senate against anti-clerical 
tyranny, with its Article 7, its expulsions of the mem- 
bers of religious orders, its brutal suppression of the 
budget of worship, and its watchword: Let the pastors 
take bags on their backs ! All the pretension I make — 
and on this point, I confess, I admit neither dispute 
nor reply — is that I be indeed allowed to derive my in- 
spiration, if not from some or from all of my father's 
opinions, at least from their spirit itself, in proportion 
as I think I understand it. Let me be allowed to in- 
voke one of the noblest and most generous recommen- 
dations that he bequeathed to his people, and by which 
he warned them never to allow a sentiment due to his 
memory to be used against an idea adopted for suf- 
ficient reasons. 

As long as I proceed according to the dictates of my 
conscience; as long as the opinions, whether popular or 
unpopular, that I embrace are imposed upon me by 
their apparent conformity with truth and by it only; as 
long as the voice that I strive to listen to and to follow 
is that of Christ, it will be impossible for me to attach 
a tragic importance to divergences of views necessarily 
of secondary consideration. The agreement that, after 
all, is alone important, is not perhaps even that which 
is produced on the fundamental points of thought: it is 
the harmony of souls, it is the ear inclined and the 
spirit opened in the direction of Revelation. The rest 
could not be of capital importance; and a very strange 



INTRODUCTORY. 17 

conception of filial devotion is necessary in order to 
make the duty of thinking in the same way about the 
seat of authority and about the apostolical succession 
enter into it. 

Truly, these personalities are the fruit of a zeal whose 
source I know how to respect, just as I could not have 
a grudge against those good people who have signified 
to me their displeasure at seeing me pass a favorable 
judgment on an '' agent of Eome," who have reproached 
me with my ignorance by revealing to me that Protest- 
ant peoples are infinitely more prosperous than Catholic 
peoples, and who have recommended me to read a book 
on the conflicts between science and faith, in which 
Catholicism is directly attacked with arguments taken 
from the arsenal of popular free-thought and v/hich 
would leave nothing of Christianity standing. It suf- 
fices that upright souls, those consciences in the pure 
mirror of which is reflected the religion of Christ, have 
been troubled, disturbed, saddened, so that there be 
occasion to offer all the explanations compatible with 
the rights of truth. 

Since none of those in whose good faith I sincerely 
believe have been scandalized at the manner in which 
I have treated the author of the ' ' Life of Cardinal 
Manning ' ' and his work, however strange their interest 
in such a client may seem to be, I owe them a justifica- 
tion of my opinion of Mr. Purcell and his book, more 
ample than that of my articles. Since others have 
been astonished at the very choice of this subject and 
at seeing a writer who, in any case, should not be 
accused of having been brought up in the sacristy, treat 
2 



18 purcell's '^manning" refuted. 

Manning's personality with such tender respect, I wish 
to state briefly the reasons for this effort. 

Since several of my critics, in fine, have without 
circumlocution raised the question of my own religious 
convictions; since they have striven with all their might 
either to set me in contradiction with myself or to con- 
vince me of some indefinable Catholicizing dilettantism, 
or to compel me at once and already to complete the 
evolution whose circuit they have calculated for me 
and to justify the syllogism that they have constructed 
in my behalf, by admitting like them the necessity of 
one of those acts on which one does not go back and by 
completing my abjuration, I owe it to them, I owe it 
to myself, to trace as faithfully as possible the condi- 
tion of soul that gave rise to these articles — and until 
now to these only. 

I. 

Before touching on any other point, it is proper, then, 
that I explain myself in regard to the case of Mr. Pur- 
cell, the author of the two massive volumes that contain 
the life of Manning, and that have served as the occa- 
sion and the theme of my study. The judgment that 
I felt myself obliged to pass on him in the Revue des 
Deux Mondes, and which I think I ought to keep un- 
altered in this volume, is marked with much severity 
and at the same time differs so completely from that of ' 
certain of my critics that I would expose myself to all 
the severity of the most pitiless judgment if I did not 
try to give a serious reason for it. In the brief sum- 
mary to which I have been compelled to confine my- 



INTRODUCTORY. 19 

self, I was prevented from entering into the details of 
this examination; I had to remain satisfied with a sum- 
mary description of Mr. Purcell's manner of writing 
history, and to proceed on the line of assertions, instead 
of following the slow course of a regular demonstration. 

Several of my censors have shown the greatest ill- 
will against me on this account. They would, I 
imagine, have been somewhat embarrassed in justify- 
ing the symxpathetic, nay, almost tender interest that 
Mr. Purcell has awakened in them. To men ill-dis- 
posed towards Manning it was a real piece of good 
fortune to find a biographer. Catholic in religion, who 
announced himself as authorized and almost as official, 
who had unquestionably drawn upon the most authen- 
tic sources, who undoubtedly produced a most formid- 
able array of new documents, and who, while inces- 
santly protesting his love and respect for his hero, 
poured out floods of discredit and shame upon him, by 
his narratives, by his judgments, by his accusations, 
and even by his praises. On the contrary, is it not in- 
tolerable that a writer whose antecedents scarcely admit 
of his discarding impartiality a priori, and who can 
hardly be accused of obeying preconceived sympathies, 
should turn up to spoil everything ? 

It would have been difficult to make a grievance 
against me of my not having espoused, with my eyes 
shut, the assertions of the so-called Catholic historian; 
of my not wanting either to accept his facts without 
verification, or to endorse his judgments without re- 
serve. AVhat they have not failed to blame severely 
was either the effrontery of pretending to point out the 



20 purcell's ''manning" refuted. 

way to my master or the indecency of borrowing the 
chief materials of my study from a book that I treated 
so rudely. A strange reproach, forsooth, as if there was 
the least logical contradiction, or the slighest moral in- 
delicacy, in making use of documents that one has 
previously sifted with criticism, in confronting an 
author with himself before drawing upon him and of 
asking himself to supply the means of rectifying or re- 
futing him. 

Moreover, by no means is there question of an 
isolated text. Mr. Purcell's biography has merely had 
to take its place in the list of the already numerous 
works, the titles of the chief of which I gave at the 
head of my first article. Manning himself had already 
produced a rather copious literature. It is not even 
one of the slightest grievances to be alleged against this 
surprising biographer that he has treated with extra- 
ordinary disdain as well the authors who had preceded 
him as the works of Manning himself. An historian 
who does not find a passage worth borrowing in Mr. 
Hutton's little volume or in the brief and substantial 
pamphlet in which Dr. Gasquet has given an admirable 
sketch of Cardinal Manning's spiritual expression — a 
writer who does not look for a single point of informa- 
tion in the sermons, prefaces, and innumerable other 
productions that came from the Archbishop of West- 
minster's pen during sixty years' activity, betrays a 
singular lack of preparation for his task. 

Fortunate had it been if he had committed only this 
grave sin of omission! Mr. Purcell will not have con- 
tracted a debt of gratitude towards his champions : it is 



INTRODUCTORY. 21 

they who compel us to produce the proofs of our accus- 
ations and to reveal to the public what is covered by 
and on what rest the so-called judge's pretended de- 
crees on Cardinal Manning. Let us speak in the first 
place of the spirit in which Mr. Purcell approached his 
task. To a biographer, he himself very justly says, his 
hero ought to be an object of special, of supreme in- 
terest, and, we will add, of respectful sj^mpathy. With- 
out this disposition it would be better to leave the 
carrying out of the mission to some one else than to 
take it upon oneself. Well! I make bold to assert 
that that is precisely the feeling in which Mr. Purcell 
is most obviously lacking. 

Whether he entertained an old-time unfavorable pre- 
judice against Manning, or rather belongs to that cate- 
gory of minds that are incapable of feeling for a long 
time a real admiration for any one whomsoever, and 
that speedily grow weary, in studying or in relating his 
life, of calling Aristides the Just, at every instant he 
betrays an instinctive malevolence, one might almost 
say a preconceived hostihty which only grows and is 
embellished at every step, against the Archbishop of 
Westminster. I cannot think of citing all the passages 
in which this state of soul breaks out; some typical 
examples will suffice to give an idea of it. 

Even before having under consideration, no longer a 
fully developed boy, but a character already formed, he 
cannot help attributing the most lamentable pettiness 
to Manning. At school, he represents him as never 
speaking of others (in letters or in his diary), but 
from compensation, ever ready to converse minutely 



22 purcell's ''manning" refuted. 

and abundantly of himself (Vol. I, p. 18). At the 
University, he attributes to him, with a vanity extend- 
ing even to his toilet, an egotism, an exaggerated con- 
sciousness of himself, which, according to our author, 
was to remain attached to him, like a Nessus tunic, 
until the end of his life (ib., p. 30). Led to note that 
at this date Manning is iess concerned with religious 
questions than with politics, he says amiably that the 
young man could speak only of the subjects that 
brought him an audience hanging on his lips (ib., p. 61). 
He writes, without seeming to suspect the wrong that 
such an assertion, if it were true, would do to him who 
is its object, that fortune, that anti-spiritual divinity, 
in whose presence Manning had assumed the habit of 
bowing, asked its faithful adorer for one homage, one 
sacrifice more (ib., p. 195). He speaks, in a passing 
way, as of the most natural thing in the world, of the 
habit, partly congenital, partly acquired by Manning, 
of never committing himself to an unpopular movement 
and of never taking position on the side of an unfor- 
tunate cause (ib., p. 204). Farther on he represents 
Manning as a man ready to recede from no sacrifice of 
friendship v/hen there was question of the Church or of 
his personal interest {ib., p. 244). 

In a truly typical passage he paints this new Machia- 
velli, this Anglican Jesuit, much more concerned with 
serving his party in the palaces than in the universities ; 
infinitely less anxious to study the subtleties of theology, 
-the Fathers of the Church and Catholic antiquity than to 
follow the intrigues of Parliament and of the Court ; far 
from deeply absorbed in the publication of ' ' Tract 



INTRODUCTORY. 23 

No. 90, ' ' the storm that it let loose, the reawakening 
of Anglo-Catholicism of which it was the occasion, but 
all engrossed in the antechamber rumors of Downing street 
{ib., p. 265). To him Manning is the adorer of the ris- 
ing sun^ the enemy of unpopular minorities^ the born de- 
serter of condemned causes. 

It seems to me that it suffices to reproduce these 
monstrous passages in order to place their author in a 
strange embarrassment. If these references be correct, 
how did Mr. Purcell come to entertain the idea of writ- 
ing the life of tliis courtier of fortune, of this ambitious 
man, of this intriguing ecclesiastic? How especially 
did he think he could make a hero and a saint of him ? 
By what marvelous sleight-of-hand did he hoj)e to 
reconcile these judgments, hurled as he went along, 
with the final formula of canonization that crowns his 
work ? I leave to Mr. Purcell the task of reconciling 
these contradictions. For my part, it suffices for me 
to place these indescribable calumnies side by side with 
the facts — I mean those very facts that are stated by our 
author and in the documents that he had at his dis- 
posal and that he has communicated to us. The 
reader will undoubtedl}'- find the expression not too 
strong when he vail have followed me into one or two 
of these proofs. 

To begin, let us take Manning's entrance into orders. 
For telling us of this important event Mr. Purcell had 
before him a certain number of documents which he 
has published in the strange manner that is familiar to 
him, as I will show farther on, but which, in fine, he 
has laid before our eyes. The materials consisted of 



24 purcell's '^ manning" refuted. 

three autobiographical notes, drawn up by the Cardinal 
some fifty years after the date of the facts to which they 
refer; letters and fragments of letters, some of them, on 
the contrary, written as early as 1832, especially those 
to his mother and to Mr. Twistleton, a friend of his 
when a young man. It is shown as clear as day from 
these documents that Manning, whether at that very 
period or half a century later, was absolutely convinced 
that he ought to obey a vocation from on high, an ap- 
peal, as he himself said, from God ad veritatem et ad 
ipsum. All the testimonies point to this meaning; there 
is not the shadow of a single one of them with an op- 
posite sense: one might think that Mr. Purcell would 
feel bound to follow this version, the only authentic 
one. 

This would come from knowing him imperfectly, in- 
deed. He insinuates that Manning's vocation was 
most probably the fruit of an illusion; that the young 
clergyman was himself duped if he thought he was 
obeying any other considerations than purely mundane 
motives, and that in reality he felt none of the religious 
emotions whose effect on his soul he pointed out later 
on. That is clear speaking. One would only like to 
know on what all this scaffolding of hypotheses rests 
and where are the documents that entitle our author 
thus to belie his hero to his face. Documents! there 
are none. Mr. Purcell has simply judged as improba- 
ble and absurd a motive as strange and as extraordinary 
as a divine vocation. Forgetting the two absolutely 
contemporary letters that he himself has published and 
that confirm on every point the later version of the 



INTRODUCTORY. 25 

diary, he holds that the Cardinal, in time, had lost the 
exact recollection of the manner in which things had 
happened and had somewhat embellished his story. 
Moreover, if this reasoning does not convince the reader, 
he has an argument in reserve that he deems irresisti- 
ble: if Manning, he says, had really heard this appeal, 
he would without fail have communicated it to his con- 
fidant, his daily correspondent, his brother-in-law, Mr, 
John Anderdon. Now, he did not do so: he did not, 
then, obey this supernatural impulse. 

The syllogism is correct. Mr. Purcell' s logic is fault- 
less, with the unfortunate exception that his minor is 
false. Manning had precisely made known to his 
brother-in-law the feelings with which he was animated. 
There is in existence a copy of his letters in two small 
books that escaped Mr. Purcell. Dr. Gasquet, who 
married a niece of the Cardinal's, had quoted from 
them on pages 10 and 11 of his brief pamphlet pub- 
lished in 1895, two extracts that finally dispose of all 
of Mr. Purcell' s quibbles. The author of the pretended 
authorized biography, if he had deigned to cast his 
eyes on this modest and admirable little work, would 
have found in it not only information such as this, 
drawn from a proper source, but also a luminous and 
delicate analysis of Cardinal Manning's spiritual char- 
acter. Ab uno disce omnes. Such is the spirit with 
which the so-called ofiicial biographer approached his 
task ! 

It is this same singular need of blackening that 
guided him in his manner of relating and of judging 
another episode. There is question of Manning^ s re- 



26 purcell's ^'manning" refuted. 

fusal, in 1846, of the place of sub-chaplain to the Queen 
that was offered to him in consequence of the promo- 
tion of his brother-in-law, Samuel Wilberforce, to the 
episcopate. This post was the first step in the ladder 
of honors. It would have brought Manning close to 
the Court, it would have facilitated for him that rapid 
advancement which everj^body prognosticated for him, 
and which would have enticed him rather keenly, if he 
had been the ambitious man of whom his enemies 
speak — and along with them his biographer. Well! 
his diary of that period shows him to us, after a 
week's reflection, as meeting that offer with a deliberate 
refusal, and giving as the reason for it the obligation of 
his parish care of souls, the necessity of mortifying 
himself interiorly and the higher interest of his own 
soul. ' ' To learn to say no, ' ' he wrote in these pages 
made for himself only, ' ' to disappoint myself, to choose 
the harder part, to resist my own inclination, to prefer 
that people think less well of me, to receive less of the 
gifts of this world, that could not be an error: that too 
closely resembles the cross. Oh ! humility, nothing but 
humility! may God grant it to me!" Will any one be- 
lieve it ? It was after having had this passage before 
his eyes, it was after having reproduced both the de- 
cision and its motives, that Mr. Purcell took upon him- 
self to give to Manning lessons in renunciation and 
humility. He taxes him unsparingly with ambition 
and worldliness. He represents him as having regrets 
that he is pleased to attribute to remorse or to the restless- 
ness of his temperament, or to both these causes at one and 
the same time. 



INTRODUCTORY. 27 

Strange, nevertheless, as this manner of writing his- 
tory may be, side by side with the original documents 
and in spite of them, so far, comparatively, it is only 
trifles. Mr. Purcell did not stop at so favorable a 
point. He unqualifiedly accuses Manning of having 
adopted an attitude and language bearing the ear-marks 
of duplicity from 1846 to 1851; of having for six years 
concealed from his Church, and from his best friends, 
the condition of his soul and his most secret feelings; 
of having, in a word, covered with the veil of an odious 
hypocrisy the great spiritual work that was to lead him 
to the Catholic Church. If this reproach be well- 
founded, it is not only this period of Manning's life 
that is tarnished and dishonored by it; it is his whole 
existence, his whole character, his whole being, that are 
stained by the most repugnant duplicity. His dearest 
convictions, his charity, his holiness even, have their 
roots in lying. The vain undertaking of proposing to 
the admiration of men a master in the perfidious art of 
using words with double meanings and of double- 
dealing acts must be abandoned. One does not under- 
stand why Mr. Purcell wasted his time in raising a 
monument to him of whom he formed such an idea. 
This contradiction is surprising. How is it, besides, 
that the author of this accusation feels its gravity so 
little that in a certain sense he launches it in pass- 
ing, without unfolding all its consequences? Thank 
Heaven, here again the proofs are totally wanting, or 
rather all of them agree in refuting this calumny. 

Let us listen to a justly respected periodical, edited 
in an entirely Anglican spirit, far from prejudiced in 



28 purcell's ^'manning" refuted. 

favor of perverts from the national Church, the Spectator 
(February 8, 1896) : " In the private diaries and letters 
purporting to give what Mr. Purcell calls the 'inner 
man, ' who doubted the validity of the Anglican posi- 
tion from 1846 to 1850, we find likewise expressed his 
suspicion that the doubt may be due to delusion. This 
being so, he declares it to be his duty to speak hope- 
fully of the English Church and not to unsettle others 
in their allegiance to it. And ii) the letters cited in the 
same chapter as giving the ' outer m^an, ' or the ' public 
voice, ' we do not find assertions inconsistent with private 
doubts of the Anglican position; but rather a line of 
argument which urges the duty of remaining in the 
Anglican Communion in spite of personal doubts. ' ' 

The case could not be better expressed, and this 
testimony of a competent and impartial critic will no 
doubt balance in the reader's mind the imputations 
dictated to a self-styled friend by a malevolent preju- 
dice and an incredible confusion of thoughts. To the 
Spectator, as well as to me, Manning's honesty was 
absolute during that long and difficult and painful 
period when it was hardly possible for him to put into 
his language and his attitude more unity than there 
was in the conceptions of his inner consciousness. 

Certainly I will not be required to examine with a 
magnifying glass the singular tissue of errors and 
sophisms on which Mr. Purcell bases his words. Let 
us remain satisfied with pointing out, in an argumenta- 
tion in which dates are naturally of capital importance, 
the incurable levity with which Mr. Purcell assigns on 
a single page, a few lines apart, two different years, 



INTRODUCTORY. 29 

1847 and 1849, to a letter which, a few pages further 
on, he again dates otherwise, and whose meaning, 
moreover, he totally distorts to the advantage of his 
cause. Has he at least adopted a more conscientious 
method when he has come to the years of Manning's 
life as a Catholic, that is to say, to the portion of his 
career for which one can and ought to suppose that he 
has more sympathy and is better equipped ? He has 
taken care not to do so. It is always the same morbid 
need of soiling his hero that dominates in him. In the 
affair of Cardinal Wiseman's coadjutor cum jure succes- 
simiis, one would say, if he is to be heeded, that Man- 
ning interfered in it, propria motu, that it w^as he who 
stirred up the war and drove it to extremes, and that 
he followed' it out for personal ends. How was it that 
our author, in the entirely disproportioned space, 
moreover, of nearly two hundred pages of his second 
volume that he has given to that episode at the risk of 
outrageously falsifying the true character of two episco- 
pates, did not find room to say that Manning had been 
ofiicially commissioned by his archbishop to attend to 
this affair at the court of Rome, that he was acting in 
accordance with hierarchical obedience, and that he 
could not do otherwise ? 

What an odious falsification it is to represent the 
correspondence between Manning and Mgr. George 
Talbot as a sort of intrigue plotted by an ambitious 
man, desirous of reaching the ear of the Holy Father, 
and far from scrupulous as to the choice of means! 
Was Mr. Purcell aware, yes or no, that the private 
chamberlain was the regular, recognized, normal organ 



30 puecell's "manning" refuted. 

of comm-Qnications that had not to pass through the col- 
lege of the Propaganda; that he was Cardinal Wiseman's 
accredited as:ent at the court of Rome, and that Man- 
ning, in writing to him, did nothing but obey and 
follow the example of all his colleagues of the archi- 
episcopal staff ? These are very strange, very suspicious 
acts of forgetfulness. It is true that they fade before 
the guilty free-and-easy way in which the so-called 
authorized biographer has cast before the public the 
confidential notes of a secret correspondence, has 
scandalized some and hurt others by reviving old quar- 
rels, and has maliciously isolated Manning's letters 
alone. 

As he found time to write so copiously the history of 
this conflict, and yet did not feel bound to expatiate 
on Manning's diocesan activity, on his spiritual and 
charitable works, on his preaching, on his directing of 
consciences, on his books and on his works, he should 
have at least completed his picture by tracing the final 
peace-making. Does a man write with the impartial- 
ity of an historian, to say nothing of the good-will of a 
friend, when he relates lengthily the quarrels between 
Manning and Canon Maguire, their pointed words, 
their sometimes hostile proceedings, and yet says noth- 
ing of their reconciliation, of that long malady during 
which the Archbishop came every day to visit his old 
adversary, who exclaimed from his death -bed: ''Your 
steps on the stairway have been music in my ears?" 
After having related Wiseman's painful conflict with 
his coadjutor, Errington, was it, then, not necessary 
also to describe the noble serenity of the submission 



INTRODUCTORY. 31 

with which the former Archbishop of Trebizond retired 
into a small country parish and forgot, in the care of 
souls in that remote villlage, the greatness that came 
near being his own? There is as much bad faith in 
being silent on fine traits of this sort as there would be 
in a wholesale inventing of regrettable incidents. 

How, in fine, are we to qualify the inspiration that 
presided over the interminable recital of the misunder- 
standings between Newman and Manning ? Mr. Pur- 
cell, from one end to the other, exalts him whose life he 
is not writing and lowers him who is regarded -as his 
hero. His partiality breaks out even so strongly that 
it is its own antidote. He does not know how to see a 
wrong in the Edgbaston Oratorian, nor a meritorious 
act in the Archbishop of Westminster. Here, fortu- 
nately, the matter too far surpasses the imperturbably 
judicial mediocrity of our historian. It is too evidently 
not in his province to harmonize such differences — 

Tantas componere lites. 

Documents abound. He has added quite a cargo of 
them to those that we already possessed. I am sure 
that the competent public will know how to discern the 
truth; that they will extricate, not without deploring 
them, the causes of this regrettable misunderstanding; 
that they will take account of the circumstances, of the 
personalities and of the surroundings, and that they 
will by no means subscribe to the unjust condemnation 
formulated against Manning by a man as far from capa- 
ble of penetrating his soul and of understanding his 
nature as of entering into Newman' s inner life. 



32 purcell's '^ manning" refuted. 

The evil is not perhaps very great, even though tem- 
porary or passing critics, ever on the watch for some 
happy chance that dispenses them from reading a work 
before giving an account of it, have made the utmost 
use of this inter mediar}^, and though partisans ever 
greedy for scandals in a rival denomination have mor- 
alized as best they could on that edifying spectacle of 
the quarrel between the two restorers of English Catho- 
licism. If the public had not taken literally the noisy 
claims by which Mr. Purcell and his friends had 
announced the publication of his book: 

Nescio quid majus nascitur Uiade ! 

if they had not unaffectedly put faith in our author's 
somewhat too advantageous pretentions, all these per- 
fidies would have scarcely any importance. 

Unfortunately, people in general are still ignorant of 
the fact that, far from being chosen by Cardinal Man- 
ning to write his life, Mr. Purcell obtained from that 
ever charitable prelate an authorization that was only a 
sort of delicately veiled assistance, because he had 
made a poor mouth, because there was question of re- 
lieving him from desperate straits, and because he had 
declared that he would find a gold mine in the publi- 
cation of a book of this sort. People will be astonished 
that Mr. Purcell, who has seen fit to make room for so 
many suspicious anecdotes, did not spare two or three 
lines to pay homage to this generosity. People will be 
still more astonished that, treated with such great kind- 
ness, but without the least familiarity, by the Cardinal, 
he knew how to pose as his hero's confidential intimate 



INTRODUCTORY 33 

friend. Surprise will touch very close on another feel- 
ing when people will learn that, instead of having had 
innumerable conversations, and the prolonged relations 
that seem to be implied by his narrative, with the Car- 
dinal's then only surviving sister, Mrs. Austin, he had 
in reality only seen her hut once for an hour or two, and 
then this lady was already far advanced in years. I 
set aside the question of propriety, or rather of dehcacy 
and honor, raised by the singular treatment of ^Manning 
by a writer to whom he had opened the treasures of his 
heart and of his memory. It will suffice for me to re- 
mark that no more in this chapter than in the others is 
Mr. Purcell worthy of implicit confidence. Truly I am 
happy to think that, on this point as on so many 
others, the radical inaccuracy of his assertions pertains, 
not to the deliberate purpose of deceiving, but to a con- 
stitutional incapacity for telling the truth. 

For the faculty of falling into error is really phenom- 
enal in Mr. Purcell. One might say without exaggera- 
tion that it is in spite of him and by mere chance that 
he sometimes finds the truth. He begins by making a 
mistake of a year in the date of Manning's birth, and 
that voluntarily, in opposition to all the previous testi- 
monies and existing titles. In his picture of the Uni- 
versit)^ of Oxford he commits a series of gross errors 
from which the slightest glance at a Calendar would 
have saved him. To him the question of Catholic 
Emancipation, settled in 1829 by Sir Robert Peel and 
Wellington, is still under consideration three years 
later. He confounds epochs that are most distinct from 
one another to the extent of giving Pusey's name to the 



34 purcell's "manning" refuted. 

Oxford movement at a date when the Regius Professor 
of Hebrew had not yet given pnhlic adhesion to Trac- 
tarianism. I could indefinitely multiply these proofs 
of ignorance and levity that cannot fail to cause con- 
fusion. 

Perhaps some one v/ill plead extenuating circum- 
stances for what bears on the Anglican period of Man- 
ning's life. After all, Mr. Purcell is a Catholic by 
birth, and though he should have conscientiously j)re- 
pared himself for speaking of things and people whom 
he did not know at first hand, one may use indulgence 
towards him in this domain. But what are we to say 
of the still more monstrous errors that he commits 
when he has approached the Catholic period of the 
Archbishop of Westminster's life, and v/hen he moves 
on ground that ought to be familiar to him ? Here I 
will confine myself to pointing out a single error, but I 
think that after having measured it there will not be 
found many people of good faith who will still defend 
Mr. Purcell's competence. 

Open the second volume of this monumental work, 
at page 532. The very title of this nineteenth chapter, 
of itself alone, has something calculated to plunge you 
into a condition of surprise: The second English cardinal 
since the Reformation^ is the title that our author gives to 
the section of his book in which he relates Manning's 
promotion to the Roman purple. Thus to him the 
English cardinals who received the hat since 1540, 
Pole, Allen, Weld, Norris, Howard, York, Acton, etc., 
have no reality, and there was no English prince of 
the Church before Manning but Wiseman. 



INTRODUCTORY. 35 

Let us continue. Mr. Purcell asks how it happens 
that the titles of the great champion of InfaUibihty at 
the Vatican Council could have remained unknown for 
such a long time. Had he been forgotten in the sur- 
roundings of Pius IX ? Had he stirred up irreconcila- 
ble opposition in the Sacred College ? It is to this last 
hypothesis that our historian has recourse, and he 
writes the following lines, whose savor I would reproach 
myself for spoiling by any commentary whatever: 
''[Pius IX] had not forgotten Archbishop Manning. 
He had proposed, in the first or second year after the 
Council, his name for election to the Sacred College. 
But the Cardinals, acting within their right, had de- 
clined to elect him. Three years later, after the death 
of Cardinal Barnabo, Prefect of Propaganda, no friend 
of Manning's, the Pope again proposed him. It is the 
custom of the College of Cardinals to elect unanimously 
a candidate proposed for the second time, since they 
regard it as an expression of the Pope's deliberate wish 
and determination. Accordingly, at the Consistory 
held on the 15th of March, 1875, Archbishop Manning 
was admitted by an unanimous vote into the College of 
Cardinals. ' ' 

It would diminish the value of this incomparable 
pearl to insist too much upon it. Thus, to Mr. Pur- 
cell, a Catholic historian, the Sacred College is recruited 
by cooptation, and the part of the Sovereign Pontiff is 
confined to proposing candidates whom the cardinals 
reject or accept at their pleasure. One should not 
require a very exact knowledge of history nor a very 
strict method from a man who forms such ideas of the 
most eminent institutions of his own Church. 



36 purcell's '' manning" refuted. 

And so, indeed, there is nothing like the disorder, or 
rather chaos, of Mr. Purcell's mind. Having at his 
disposal a mass of original documents of different 
origin and dates, he should have begun by classifying 
them, dividing them between the series of contemporary 
pieces and that of retrospective writings, according to 
chronological order; instead of that, he has in some way 
thrown them in his reader's face. Constantly a letter 
is found ten pages after what it should have preceded. 
Another re-appears three times with slight alterations 
in the text under three different dates. He cuts up 
into the smallest fragments the documents he makes 
use of, and he takes pleasure in scattering these membra 
disjecta. His own narrative is no less confused. He 
goes back twice, three times, nay of tener, over the same 
subject, resumes, stops short, contradicts himself, for- 
gets what he has just said. 

Such is the author whom certain critics, seized with 
superstitious respect, have wanted to dub an infallible 
historian. Such is the writer whom certain persons 
whom I strongly suspect — and it is almost an extenuat- 
ing circumstance — of not having read him, and have 
wished to impute to me as a crime my having pro- 
nounced against him as a w^itness and as a judge. 
Such is the incomparable master at whose feet one 
should have sat down and repeated with the docility of 
a child, not only his calumnies against the dead, but 
even his marvelous discoveries in modern history. I 
make bold to hope that after a little demonstration 
which imprudent friends have made necessary, ad- 
mirers will no longer be found so blinded by the spirit 



INTRODUCTORY. 37 

of sectarianism as to persist in confidently invoking 
Mr. Purcell's testimony, were it against the hero of his 
biography. 

II. 

I need hardly say that it is not, however, simply to 
give myself the satisfaction of denouncing this weighty 
plea that I have written these pages. Long ago, I con- 
fess, I took occasion, when presenting to the French 
public an abridged history of the Oxford movement, to 
pay to Manning the signal homage that was in my 
heart. Led at first to study him closely by reason of 
the part he played in the great strike on the Thames 
docks, in 1889, I was not slow in passing from his 
social to his charitable and religious activity, and then 
to his whole personality. That exalted episcopal 
figure, so rigid and so modern, of such ascetic sanctity 
and of charity so broad; that devoted old priest, in this 
nineteenth century and in that Protestant country, in 
unrelaxing and uncompromising defence of what is 
most extreme in the most militant Catholicism, and, at 
the same time, with unbounded compassion and truly 
pastoral solicitude watching over all the sufferings of 
his people, why should I not give way to the powerful 
charm ? 

Newman acted forcibly on the mind — Nevrman, that 
subtle logician who stretched dialectics to the point of 
giving them an indescribable and disquieting tinge of 
casuistry; that bold idealist who was predestined to 
turn towards the eternal realities the looks of the in- 
habitants of a world in the material reality of which he 



38 purcell's "manning" refuted. 

had never been able to believe; that Christian skeptic, 
in fine, to whom the postulates of faith are the only 
axioms of certitude, and. who sees in the dogmas of 
Revelation God's only answer to the doubts and 
anguishes of reason. Nothing would be more ungrate- 
ful than to w^ant to reject a master at whose feet our 
generation had so much to learn. For my part, I 
know what it has cost me to point out certain shadows 
in the brightness of that pure glory, in order to refute 
calumnies from which Manning has had to suffer too 
much. All of Mr. Purcell's evil spirit was needed to 
rekindle these posthumous polemics. Thank Heaven, 
they cannot be perpetuated; those who have charitably 
applauded and turned to account that myth of an 
irreconcilable hostility between the two great restorers 
of English Catholicism, will regret their brief joy. In 
the bosom of death, in the majestic unity of the eternal 
Christianity, these little differences have disappeared, 
and one can admire Manning without attacking New- 
man, or vice versa. What attracts in such a subject is 
not those retrospective controversies, it is in the first 
place interest in that great spiritual risk. In this rest- 
less age, when so many crafts wander compassless on 
the waves, without a pilot and without a rudder, noth- 
ing consoles like the spectacle of a life that has dared 
the high sea and the storms, that has approached many 
shores, that has even had to part with its anchors after 
having cast them there in desperation, and that at last 
has entered port after incurring so many dangers. 
There is, there ever will be, an almost irresistible attrac- 
tion in the story of those lives that have described vast 



INTRODUCTORY. 39 

parabolse, that have known great heart-rendings and 
have completed great sacrifices. If the history of a 
Lamennais, beginning with faith — or at least with the 
keen wish for faith, in a great struggle imposed on him- 
self and on others — and ending in the most lamentable 
of shipAvrecks and in that species of the fierce isolation 
of a Titan struck by lightning, who was indeed able to 
renounce Christ but not to throw off his priestly robes 
— if that tragic story has excited our contemporaries, 
what an interest will not be offered by the striking con- 
trast of the ascension of a man's soul, led step by step^ 
degree by degree, by the spirit of truth, of the elemen- 
tary intuitions of faith, to the summits of revealed 
religion and of the supernatural certitudes ? 

In the presence of these personages, so noble and so 
melancholy, of a Lamennais, of a Jouffroy, of a 
Scherer, on whose brows a ray of grace seemed to be 
placed only to leave to them inconsolable regret for that 
brightness forever lost, it is good to place the figure re- 
splendent with light and joy of one of those whom God 
led by the hand from the weak beginning of a still 
rather imperfect conversion to the glorious consumma- 
tion of the work of their salvation. If, in Manning's 
case, this evolution was not accomplished without a 
revolution; if he believed he ought to leave the Church 
of his baptism, of his first communion and of his con- 
secration, in order to go and ask of another Church 
enfranchisement from the usurpations of the civil 
power, the integral preservation of the deposit of faith, 
the regularity of the Apostolic succession, the organiza- 
tion of discipline, the efficacy of the sacraments and 



40 purcell's ''manning" refuted. 

the reality of unity; if, born a Protestant, after twenty 
years in the Anghcan ministry he became a Cathohc 
and a priest, there is nothing in that which in advance 
could have robbed him of respect or of sympathy. In 
these matters, I feel certain, it suffices to merit or even 
to obtain these feelings of good faith; and in kind it 
could not be disputed, any more than Manning's dis- 
interestedness or even his spirit of sacrifice. Without 
entering for the moment into an examination of the 
vaHdity of the motives that directed him on this solemn 
occasion, is it not just to show that the entire progress 
of that internal evolution, from the first day on which 
the young clergyman's attention was called to the 
temporal role of the Holy Ghost and to the promises of 
assistance made by our Lord Jesus Christ, until the 
hour when he believed he had found its perfect realiza- 
tion in the authority of the Church and in the doctrinal 
infallibility of the Sovereign Pontiff, was much less a 
purely intellectual work than a labor of conscience ? I 
make bold to assert that any one who will without 
prejudice read the documents, that is to say, the letters 
and the fragments of a private diary, in the decisive 
phase from 1847 to 1851, whatever judgment he passes 
on the basis of things, and even indeed when he would 
see in Manning's gradual approach towards Catholic- 
ism a capital and fatal error, will not be able to keep 
from recognizing and proclaiming the sincerity of his 
effort, the uprightness of his intentions, the growth of 
his piety. 

At first sight, this declaration — or this avowal — might 
seem like a dilettante witticism or even a lesson in 



INTRODUCTORY. 41 

skepticism. And yet who will pretend that God has 
promised to the individual soul the privilege of infalh- 
bihty on all points as a reward for sanctity ? When 
one writes the history of a man, prejudices, theories, 
doctrines themselves are of little importance; what 
there is question of taking hold of and reproducing is 
the life itself, acts, words, thoughts. I would have 
singularly falsified Manning's portrait if I had not 
painted, without taking the least concern in the world 
as to the consequences that might be derived from it in 
such or such a sense, the perfect sincerity of his crisis : 
the predominance in his thoughts of the great essential 
principles or rather of the constitutive facts of Christian- 
ity; his comparative indifference to a multitude of 
secondary problems in which certain minds want with 
all their might to see the necessary starting-point of 
every Catholicizing evolution; his ardent concern for 
the^ single question of salvation. There was one man, 
in any case, of whom one cannot say that, if he ab- 
jured Protestantism, it was from levity, for he struggled 
for six years against himself; or from a taste for the 
ceremonial and the pomps of worship, for his parish 
church when he left it was like St. Mary's at Oxford 
under Newman, of quite Evangelical simplicity and 
austerity; and Manning, once a Catholic, never gave to 
the external rites the disproportionate importance that 
the Ritualists give to them, in the bosom of Anglican- 
ism. It is not from disdain for the Bible, for until the 
close of his life he made familiar, daily, continual use of 
it; nor from ambition, for, an archdeacon at thirty- two, 
at thirty-six he received the offer of a place that opened 



42 purcell's '' manning" refuted. 

to him the way to high dignities, and he was morally 
sure of the Anglican episcopate, while in Catholicism, 
then singularly despised and detested by the English 
people, he was only a recruit and a novice. No, all 
things agree in justifying the view that I thought 1 
ought to take of this conversion, and in showing therein 
an act of obedience and of faith in the first instance. 
And it is not only for the understanding and apprecia- 
tion of Manning's personality that this fact is of im- 
portance; it stands very high from the point of view of 
the ideas of which the Archbishop of Westminster be- 
came the chief representative in the second part of his 
career. If it is not a matter of indifference to recognize 
that Catholicism and even Ultramontanism in Man- 
ning's case were the fruit of a s^Diritual development, it 
is still less so to state that it was the same labor of con- 
science which produced the Cardinal's social concep- 
tion. 

From two opposite directions, two schools or two 
parties strive to represent Catholicism or social Christi- 
anity as a sort of thoroughly lay or earthly doctrine, 
devoid of every supernatural element, devoted only to 
the solution of a problem, apparently difficult, by 
means of human activity. Those who will not have 
social Christianity because they hate the religion of 
Christ, and those Vv^ho will not have Christian socialism 
because they hate the mere thought of an organic re- 
form of society, meet certain men of more outspoken 
zeal, but of ignorant good will, who rob this great move- 
ment of its meaning and its bearing. To bring religion 
down to earth ; to efface, or at least relegate to the back- 



I 



INTRODUCTORY. 43 

ground, everything Christian that is supernatural; to 
treat dogma as out-of-date frippery that one completely 
gets rid of by a sort of pious weakness for the past; to 
make of human unity of action the alpha and omega of 
morals without basing them on the fatherhood of God 
revealed by the brotherhood of Christ; to transform the 
Church into an immense workingmen's society, a 
mutual aid syndicate or association; to want to work 
the miracle of human love in the sphere of interests, 
after having denied the miracle of Divine love on the 
Cross; in a word, to pretend to renev/ mankind, to 
establish the kingdom of justice and of charity upon 
earth, Vvithout the aid of those great facts that contain 
all of salvation, — the salvation of the species as well as 
that of the individual, — such is the incoherent and un- 
sound dream of minds that imagine they can strike two 
blows with one stone, namely, dechristianize the 
Church, and with this dechristianized Church regener- 
ate the world. All would not formulate the object of 
their secret wishes or of their unconscionable aspira- 
tions with this pitiless precision. There are souls still 
half religious, but affected with the deadly contagion of 
modern rationalism, for whom everything that dimin- 
ishes the part of dogmatism and increases that of prac- 
tical activity in the Church, brings it close to its voca- 
tion and makes it more in conformity with its Master' s 
design. It is often the noble error of ardent and gen- 
erous hearts, touched to the quick by the sufferings and 
injustice of our society, indignant at the indifference, I 
had almost said the passive complicity, of the Church, 
who aspire to seeing it fulfil its sacred mission, and who 



44 purcell's '^ manning" refuted. 

lose sight of the fact that, without these dogmas for ego- 
tistically meditating on which they reproach themselves, 
she has neither mandate, nor strength, nor means of 
action, nor motives. In our time, when it is so far 
from easy to maintain unfailingly the testimony in 
honor of the supernatural in Christianity and of Jesus 
Christ, the miracle of miracles, nothing is as dangerous 
as the coalition of a very practical rationalism with an 
imprudent charity. And so one could not profess 
enough gratitude towards the inflexible champions of 
principles, who, while being the first to preach, and 
that with incomparable ardor, the social crusade of the 
Church, have taken care to connect it closely with the 
profession of objective, dogmatic, orthodox Christian- 
ity. They have not only cleansed the Church of a 
reproach; they have offered to the world the only 
efficacious instrument of salvation. AVhat particular 
value, then, do they imagine that the quite natural, 
quite human and earthly action of a great corporation 
could have ? Without a divine mandate, without the 
assistance of its Master, without the Gospel to reawaken 
conscience, without the sacraments to feed souls, what 
would the Church be, what would it do, what even 
could it hope for in social matters ? Social Christianity 
will be Christian in the full sense of the word, or it will 
not be. This is what Manning set forth with incom- 
parable force and clearness, not only in all that he said 
and wrote on social Catholicism, in the closing years of 
his life, but by his entire career. He believed that he 
ought to become a Catholic, because he did not believe 
he could otherwise remain a Christian; he was a Catho- 



INTRODUCTORY. 45 

lie of authority and of centralization, by virtue of the 
same need; in fine, he was the initiator of social Chris- 
tianity or Catholicism because of his very fidelity to 
doctrinal CathoUcism. This whole evolution is main- 
tained and is completed. It is one of the greatest 
honors of Manning's memory that he was the first 
representative — at least in his own country — of the 
beneficent doctrine that the social encyclicals of Leo 
XIII. have since then sanctioned and exj^lained, and 
the double object of which is to recall the "Church to 
the accomplishment of an essential part of its divine 
vocation, and to offer to our sick society the remedy of 
supernatural Christianity. 

III. 

There remains the question of principle that has 
been put to me so insistently from several directions. 
Certainly, I would by far have preferred not to have to 
entertain the reader with things that emanate from the 
conscience and in regard to which it seems to me that I 
ought to imj^ose a discreet silence upon myself. There 
are subjects, however, that one should not treat in a 
certain manner without taking at least the implicit 
pledge to carrj^ out his thought to the end, and to treat 
with silence him who asks me to say more in the name 
of what I have already said would be to fail in this. 
Some have easily picked out from my articles a keen 
sympath}^ not only for the man whose life I have 
traced, but for some of the principles of which he was 
the representative. They have put me in a position to 
state clearly where I stand on the chapter of Catho- 



46 purcell's "manning" refuted. 

licism. If there was question only of the far from deli- 
cate curiosity that takes delight in flaunting scandal, or 
even of that pitiless logic that wants at all hazards to 
reach for you the extreme consequences of your own 
assertions, no one, I am sure, would feel so ill disposed 
towards me as to hold me to the impersonal expression 
of my thought about them. Some one tells me that I 
have pained certain minds, hurt certain consciences; I 
ought, then, to try and answer those solicitudes as 
frankly as possible, and to explain myself as clearly as 
I can on the condition of soul that caused these cares. 
It should not cost me anything to acknov/ledge, in 
the first place, the pleasure that I experienced, not 
only in depicting the figure of a great Christian, but in 
paying homage to a great Catholic. Every question of 
denominational allegiance set aside, it appeared to me 
a priori that one of the best means of showing my re- 
spect for the spirit of the Reformation, that is to say, 
apparently, for a mind that ought to be free from all 
sectarian prejudice, ever ready to rise above differences 
of form and of secondary disagreements so as to detect 
the points of similarity and to hail the living unity of 
the invisible Church, was to trace freely, but lovingly, 
the portrait of a man like Manning. This way of prac- 
tically putting to a test the breadth of certain doctrin- 
aires of religious liberalism has not been too successful 
with me. In general, people have not forgiven the 
Cardinal, the Ultramontane, the pervert from Protest- 
antism because he was a friend of the poor, an ascetic, 
an imitator of Christ. They have not even appeared 
to understand the peculiar role of the historian and 



INTRODUCTORY. 47 

that, when one wishes to make a man live again, it is 
necessary to penetrate into his soul, to catch there his 
most secret movements, to share his feehngs, to make 
his affections one's own, to see through his eyes, to 
speak with his mouth, in a word, to assume his person- 
aUty. "What a pleasant method in history, and espe- 
ciallj^ in biographical history, is that which shuts you 
up as it were behind a triple padlock in your I, which 
builds a Chinese wall or an ice rampart between your 
hero and you, and which forbids you in advance to use 
that marvelous key, sympathy! No doubt, there 
exists a condition preliminary to the use of this means, 
and it is precisely because there is a previous harmony 
between him whom you have chosen and yourself; it is 
because you have not to contract yourself in order to 
get into his skin; it is, in a word, because he is indeed 
a hero to you. 

I no longer know which of my critics it was who 
poked pleasant fun at the term, a hero of charity ^ which 
I had applied to Manning. He notes that the Cardinal 
died in his bed, an octogenarian — and while bantering. 
For my part, I was unaware until then that it was abso- 
lutely necessary to die young and by a violent death in 
order to merit this name, and I had thought that some 
one had said: heroic charity, that some one had said: 
heroic probity, heroic justice, to indicate a certain 
supernatural degree of virtue to which a man cannot 
rise without the aid of grace. In any case, there is my 
confession made, and if professing a profound admira- 
tion for the man whose life one writes is ruling; oneself 
out of court and having his cause rejected for manifest 



48' purcell's ''manning" refuted. 

partiality, I have merited this verdict. That is not all. 
Called upon to be concerned in the first instance with 
Manning's evolution such as it was produced in fact, to 
follow out its bentj to see things at the same angle as 
he, I thought I ought to accept the same data of the 
problem, such as it was laid down before him. I gen- 
eralized as little as possible. The great trial of Protest- 
antism and of Catholicism, for example, was pleaded 
for him on the rather narrow and artificial ground of 
Anglicanism. He had to choose not between religion 
and authority and religion and liberty, but between the 
religion of authentic, legitimate and real authority and 
the religion of factitious and illusory authority. He 
himself was perfectly conscious of this circumstance, 
which up to a certain point modified the value of his 
conclusions. At the moment of his taking the decisive 
step and of performing the irrevocable act which from 
his being an Anglican made him a Catholic, he so 
distinctly felt that it was not Protestantism in it- 
self of which he experienced the insufficiency, that he 
admitted the possibility of going to the mystic idealism 
of the invisible Church, that is to say, to the true con- 
ception of the Reformation, quite as much as to the 
objective realism of Rome. He excluded only one part, 
return to the pseudo-Catholicism, linked with pseudo- 
Protestantism, of the Anglican Church. 

That is a fact the memory of which ought not to be 
lost sight of while reading these pages. In Manning's 
thought, under a naturally rather confused and imper- 
fect form, in the thought of him who is writing these 
lines, in a much more clearly defined form — the greater 



INTRODUCTORY. 49 

part of the difficulties, objections, criticisms, reproaches 
and grievances that at last led the Archdeacon of Chi- 
chester to Rome, were addressed not to that very 
slightly metaphysical entity, Protestantism in itself, 
but to that quite real and quite special institution, the 
Church of England. 

It would be unjust, then, merely to detach from their 
context and without any more ado apply to Protest- 
antism in itself arguments or imputations that pertain 
to that very particular form of religion, Anglicanism. 
It is even quite pointed to see certain extreme cham- 
pions of Protestantism, in their ignorant zeal, take 
under their protection an ecclesiastical establishment 
which absolutely refuses to stand on their principles, 
which repudiates all solidarity with them, and which, as 
is proved by a very beautiful passage in the first Pas- 
toral Letter of Manning as Archbishop of Westminster, 
on the attitude of the Church towards dissidents, would, 
in all probability, in the name of the Anglo -Catholic 
pretensions, show itself much more aggressive and un- 
just than is Catholicism towards Protestant Noncon- 
formism. This means — and I would have been lacking 
in truth if I had not said it — that I would be very blind 
indeed to higher truth if I did not add immediately 
that it would have been much more difficult for me as 
an historian to identif}^ myself with my hero or to repro- 
duce with their full force arguments which, while bear- 
ing on Anglicanism, do not leave Protestantism to some 
extent untouched, if I had not felt a real sympathy for 
the very groundwork of Manning's ideas. 

I do not know, in truth, wdiether I will succeed, I 



50 PURCELL^S ''manning" REFUTED. 

do not say in having others share with me, but in 
making them understand, the state of mind that dic- 
tated to me and that in my own estimation justifies my 
attitude on these questions: authorized and obhged, as 
I think I am, to write all that I have written — without 
eliminating a word from it — and at the same time to do 
only what I have done, without going a step farther. 
To conceive that, if there be a Church — in the Catholic 
sense of the word — there is only one, and it is that one 
whose centre is at Rome; to profess that, if Christianity 
is not merely the religion of individualism pure and 
simple, if, outside the mystic communion of the soul 
with its Saviour there is the solidarity and the common 
life of the members of Christ's body, the Christian or- 
ganism implies the decisive role of tradition and au- 
thority; to believe that, if the promised succor, the 
assistance of the Holy Ghost, does not bear merely on 
the personal assurance of salvation, the providential 
preservation of the deposit of faith requires a whole 
objective mechanism; to see in the sacraments, if they 
are not merely the mnemotechnic signs of the great 
facts of Redemption, powerful realities, incomparable 
means of grace and of life; to understand that, since 
reason is not the court of last resort for matters of faith, 
it ought to disavow the principle of free examination 
and to acknowledge the sovereignty of another judge: 
there is a whole collection of sentiments that will per- 
haps perforce scandalize Protestants, without fully sat- 
isfying Catholics. That is not all; at the same time as 
my mind was being opened to the somewhat hypotheti- 
cal intuition of the living unity of the Catholic system, 



INTRODUCTORY. 51 

experience revealed to me the practical consequences of 
certain Protestant premises. It is not without some 
emotion, let me be allowed to say here, that I approach 
this ground. Two years ago, speaking on an analogous 
subject, before an entirely Protestant audience, in an 
entirely Protestant city that I had chosen on purpose, I 
declared that, rather than utter certain words and ex- 
pose mjT'self to certain interpretations in surroundings 
whose atmosphere would be radically different and 
saturated with all other elements, I would prefer to put 
my hand on my mouth and remain silent. If to-day I 
break that silence, it is because I am compelled to do 
so, and imagine that I cannot better touch on these 
delicate questions than by tracing in all honesty the 
steps taken by my thought. Protestantism in its en- 
tirety, and particularly in French-speaking countries, 
has for some time felt itself on the eve of a dread crisis. 
Theological science is in the act of communicating not 
only to the clergy, but to the body of the faithful also, 
the chief results of its great labors in criticism and in 
speculation. 

To-day the watchword is: No more private study! 
no more dualism, more or less conscious and acknowl- 
edged, between what is elaborated in the study and 
what is preached in the pulpit. Frankness, frankness, 
and again frankness! Is it necessary for me to say 
how far this movement seems to me lawful or rather 
imperative ? Assuredly it would be a calumny on our 
fathers — the men of those generations that gathered and 
handed down to us the inheritance of faith and zeal of 
the Reawakening — to attribute to them, in any degree 



52 purcell's "manning" refuted. 

whatever, the intention of keeping the laity apart — or 
sheltered — from the results of theological culture. 
There was neither plot, nor conspiracy, nor even fixed 
purpose. This sort of dualism was produced because 
in fact most of the leaders themselves were still tied up 
in the bonds of the older conceptions and would have 
been very much embarrassed in communicating to their 
flocks hypotheses, moreover, still far from settled and 
by no means under control, and systems still in the 
condition of conjectures. Nevertheless, it is now a 
long time since one of the ideas on which the Re- 
awakening generation thought they should have fixed 
the edifice of their faith, — the idea of theopneustics or 
the plenary inspiration of Sacred Scripture, — found 
themselves singularly shaken. One would not at the 
present time, I think, meet many declared orthodox 
persons who would not sign with both hands, at least as 
regards the fundamental principles, Edmond Scherer's 
famous pamphlet, so furiously denounced in 1848. 
But that was only a beginning. It is not sufficient to 
destroy the unaffected confidence that sees in each 
book, in each page, in each line, in each word of the 
Bible a direct and authentic revelation, a word imme- 
diately from God. It is necessary to point out to the 
souls of the simple-minded, astonished and frightened 
at this great void, what will take the place of the 
authority of the Bible. And everywhere, on all points 
at the same time, this two-fold work is being carried 
on : on the one hand, completing the overthrow of the 
erroneous conceptions of the past; on the other, substi- 
tuting for them notions more in conformity with the 



INTRODUCTORY. 53 

present criteria of theological truth, and capable at the 
same time of offering, as heretofore, a support to relig- 
ious, individual and collective life. One would not be 
much astonished at these two parts of the work not ad- 
vancing on the same path. 

Demolitions always take place more rapidly than re- 
buildings. It is easier to ruin the theopneustic hypo- 
thesis, to destroy the unity, authenticity and antiquity 
of the Pentateuch, to refer necessarily the whole his- 
tory of Israel to the royal period as the starting point 
and to the pretended post-exile texts as dated docu- 
ments, than to reconstruct an acceptable and especially 
likely theory of the authority of the Bible and of the 
character of the Old Testament. 

Now, it must be remembered that historically Pro- 
testantism has lived on a twofold principle; first, that 
which is called formal, the authority of the Sacred 
Scriptures; second, material, justification by faith. 
These two principles are confined within a narrow 
mutual dependence. The former affirms that Jesus 
Christ is the only source of the knowledge of salvation, 
that every human soul directly and personally receives 
the light necessary to distinguish God's message in the 
documents of the history of Redemption; the second, 
that Jesus Christ alone is the source of salvation, that 
direct and immediate contact with the Saviour, even 
outside of every external means of grace, suffices for 
ever}^ human soul in order to receive the plenitude of 
Redemption. Is it not too evident that the former of 
these fundamental axioms of the Reformation, — Jesus 
Christ, the only and sufficient source of the knowledge 



64 puecell's '^manning" refuted. 

of salvation through Sacred Scripture, without tradi- 
tion and without interpreter, — is, if not strictly im- 
periled, at least surrounded with strange difficulties, 
owing to the progress of criticism ? Of old it seemed 
quite simple to the most ignorant, to the most modest 
of the faithful, to lend an ear to that voice of God which 
alone, in the written form, he ought to obey as he 
would his conscience. He took up his Bible, he turned 
over its leaves, and each word shone in his eyes like a 
divine word. Now, when he opens the Sacred Book, 
he has to begin with asking himself: Is this part in- 
deed authentic ? Is this word so ? Is it a discourse by 
Jesus Christ or a marginal note by St. John that I am 
reading ? Is it the original narrative of an eye-witness, 
or is it not rather the tendency deposit of the histori- 
cal transactions and compromises of Judseo-Christian 
diplomacy, that I am consulting? Oh! I know the 
answer that one makes: the inner meaning, the experi- 
ence of the Christian suffices for him to discern the 
sound of the Master's voice. But, in fine, this very 
principle has its limits, under penalty of falling into 
absolute subjectivism, into the only sovereignty of the 
testimonium spiritus. There must be something objec- 
tive; it must be that faith has something to take hold 
of; it must be that conscience, in order to find the 
wherewith to be satisfied, meet something that exceeds 
it in every meaning and of which it cannot set itself up 
as an infallible judge. The Reformers, I think, would 
have far from enjoyed, in their robust common sense 
and their need of the positive, those subtle theories by 
which, under the pretext of driving to its last extremity 



INTRODUCTORY. 55 

the second of their formulas, namely, Jesus Christ the 
only source of salvation, and, consequently, of reducing 
to a minimum the importance of the accessory elements 
and, if one dare say so, of the external element of that 
great redeeming fact, one sets a low price on that 
authority of the Scriptures to which on their part they 
attach no less value and in which they see the means 
by which Christ had wished to assure the objective 
knowledge of His work. Moreover, one does not stop 
such a work of decomposition where one would like: 
when the authority of the Scriptures is directly attacked 
one has not long to wait to see the very person of the 
Saviour also suffer. Those who pretend, with the best 
faith in the world, I am convinced, to crack the nut in 
order the better to taste the fruit that it conceals, to 
break the vase in order the better to inhale the perfume 
that it contains, must sooner or later acknowledge that 
they have followed a dangerous chimera. 

The famous theological renovation bears on all points 
at the same time. It extends over every domain. It 
is dogmatics, for example, by which it is demonstrated 
to us that there are no dogmas in the Gospel; that 
dogma is purely and simply the subjective and intel- 
lectual expression of a given condition of soul; that evo- 
lution, in the strict sense, Darwinian, from the word, 
presides over the formation of dogmas; that religion, in 
its final analysis, is reduced, according to Matthew 
Arnold's witty and profound expression, to morality 
touched by emotion. It is a theory of knowledge that 
people pretend to impose on us by reason of a previous 
condition of all speculation in religious matters and 



56 purcell's '^imanning" refuted. 

which fixes the relativity of every judgment, the radi- 
cal impossibility of every assertion bearing on essence 
or of every objective concept. It is a theology which 
in the first instance declares that God, as far as it is 
concerned, is, and conld be, only the sum total of ideas 
in relation to the Divinity that may be found in the 
sum total of minds; that the I, moreover, is itself also 
but a conscious sequence of localized sensations implic- 
itly asserting their mutual dependence; that, in fine, 
the veritable restoration of Christianity, that is, of the 
power of life and salvation in mankind that we cannot 
do without, implies the previous acceptance of Kant's 
criticism going beyond Kant, or rather of Hume's 
skepticism and the formal repudiation of realism in all 
domains. It is Kitschl who is the prophet of this new 
dispensation, as Schleiermacher was of an anterior 
phase, and, after Hegel, it is Kant and Hume, with 
Darwin riding behind, who must serve as masters to 
this finally authentic interpreting of Christian revela- 
tion. I certainly do not pretend that these doctrines 
already have the right of citizenship in every pulpit of 
Protestantism; but are they not often the matter of the 
teaching given to the future members of the clergy ? 
Are they not floating in the air ? Do we not hear, as a 
characteristic symptom, of connecting paths, paved 
with good intentions, showing that, after all, there is a 
great deal of truth and common sense in these ideas; 
that dogma has always made the religious atmosphere 
thicker and heavier; that the living and holy person of 
the Saviour will be so much the more clearly evident 
and in close and direct communion with us as the 



INTRODUCTORY. 67 

shadow of dogmatism will have ceased to weigh upon 
it? Do not people speak of necessary reconciliations 
with the representatives of the so-called liberal theology 
which the preceding generation thought it had to com- 
bat energetically and to eliminate as much as possible 
from the bosom of the Church ? Is not the atmosphere 
quite filled with the sound of these Lamourette kisses 
that must, we are assured, put an end to the scandal of 
the sons of the Huguenots, but by substituting for it 
another more serious scandal, that of the cordial under- 
standing in one and the same Church between Chris- 
tians and philosophers, between believers and free- 
thinkers ? 

In reality, it is towards anti-dogmatism that people 
are tending, towards a religion in which dogma will 
play a part, if not negative, at least very subordinate, 
and in which the same stroke will complete the evap- 
orating of whatever might remain of the idea of a 
Church, of that of the means of grace and of the sacra- 
ments. I certainly do not pretend in a melancholy 
way to describe a universal condition of affairs, I but 
note tendencies. Thank God, everybody knows that, 
even in the most falsified frameworks, in the most im- 
perfect forms, enough religious life remains to feed 
powerful currents. Who could be sufficiently blinded 
by party or sectarian spirit not to point out v/ith Joy 
that, in the Churches of the Reformation as well as in 
the Catholic Church, there are lives of the saints, 
triumphal deaths, splendid examples of the omnipo- 
tence of grace, and that the only indisi^utable apostolic 
succession — that which assures to Christ and to man- 



58 puecell's ''manning" refuted. 

kind an uninterrupted line of zealous servants full of 
faith — does not allow of any service outside of the very 
narrow limits of an historic communion ? It would be 
right to ask an accounting for such arrogant severity 
from any one who would undertake to issue wholesale 
condemnations against men whose shoestrings they 
would most frequently not be worthy to loose. 

Such, I dare believe, is not the feeling that I obey 
on this occasion. Does any one really imagine that 
filial piety is so easily wiped out, and that it is so easy 
to fail in respect to the memory of those to whom we 
owe all that we can have, I do not say merely of relig- 
ion, but of conscience and of honor? Is it so pre- 
sumptuous, then, while feeling the sincerest gratitude, 
the most tender veneration for the memories that are 
dear to you, to acknowledge to oneself that one could 
not live on the faith that sufficed to a soul nearer to 
God and less subject to the powers of evil? I am as- 
tonished, in truth, that people do not deign to see what 
true humility there can be in the uneasiness of a con- 
science that cannot be satisfied as to its own salvation 
with a doctrine in which it does not doubt that those 
whom it most loves and respects have found the most 
ample and most solid satisfaction of all their needs. A 
perfectly upright and pure soul, one of those natures 
in which, as was said with happy boldness by the 
great Christian philosopher, Charles Secretan, original 
sin is reduced to its congruous share, is for that very 
reason even in a measure enfranchised from the condi- 
tions that impose a whole order of pressing needs on an 
average and mediocre nature. It can uncover elements 



INTRODUCTORY. 59 

of life and take possession of them and prosper in an 
atmosphere in which a less happily gifted soul will 
suffocate and blanch. There are consciences which, in 
order to enter into direct relation with their Saviour, 
have only to get a glimpse at His divine figure in a 
flash. Their rapid and sure flight has no need of care- 
fully cleared paths, of ladders or of steps held up with 
great difficulty, which the heavier, slower and more hu- 
man step of less privileged beings could not do without. 
A sort of preestablished harmony between the Master 
and some disciples allows the latter to hear and to 
make sure of recognizing His voice, without their hav- 
ing to be on their guard for the external signs and the 
infallible marks which the great bulk of the flock could 
not disregard without danger. Fortunate navigators 
have been seen to reach port in a little bark, without 
an official pilot, without a rudder, almost without a 
compass, whilst the bulk of the passengers could not 
without the most dangerous presumption take the lib- 
erty of going up on the disciplined ship's deck, but had 
to watch her from their berths, and to obey the orders 
issued by the lawful authorities so as not to embarrass 
them in their work. 

No one, I think, will pretend that to humbly ac- 
knowledge oneself condemned to the royal highways 
is to set oneself up as a judge of those to whom God 
allows the by-ways. If, to a few select souls, grace is 
to some extent independent of dogma, it does not follow 
either that, as far as everybody is concerned, dogma 
can be directly attacked with impunity v/ithout grace 
having to suffer from it, or that one is disputing grace 



60 purcell's ''manning" refuted. 

to the former when claiming for oneself the solid 
support of dogma. God works in favor of some the 
miracle of a salvation in a certain sense individual, 
which passes through extraordinary channels. If it 
has been justly and strongly said that there are atheists 
who force belief in God and who have too many virtues 
not to be Christians in fact, how much the more should 
we not say that there are men whom the imperfections 
of their Church and of their theology could not rob of 
the possession of the one thing necessary ? To count 
for oneself on this exceptional regime would be to 
tempt God; to seek for oneself in all sincerity the 
ordinary conditions of grace, is not to pass any Judg- 
ment on these privileged persons. It is above all to 
proclaim one's own weakness; it is to confess that one 
is more accessible to the deleterious influences of an 
unhealthy atmosphere; it is to acknowledge that, with- 
out the supports and succors of tradition and authority, 
one feels his faith give way, that dogma could not be 
clouded in your eyes without grace being affected, that 
the results of modern theology or of the unrestricted 
exercise of the faculty of criticism and of free examina- 
tion, if they do not find a corrective and a necessary 
counterpoise, undermine in your soul even the very 
foundations of the work of Kedemption. I can see 
most clearly how one points out, denounces, mocks, 
if one wishes, the strange mental debilitj^, namely, the 
weakness of will of those who confess this need of au- 
thority: I absolutely deny that one has the right to 
cast moral opprobrium on this attitude and from on 
high to condemn in it some indescribable want of re- 



INTRODUCTORY. 61 

spect in those who until the end have practised the 
^individuahstic rehgion, and from wliose inheritance one 
has received an entirely Protestant name. This argu- 
ment comes with particularly bad grace from the mouth 
of those who have made of free examination a sort of 
intellectualist dogma, who admit of no exemption from 
the sovereign jurisdiction of criticism, and who, appar- 
ently, do not dispute the exercise by the Reformers of 
the right of revising tradition and of revoking to some 
extent the conclusions of those very persons from whom 
they had received the deposit of faith. If the Reforma- 
tion was able legitimately to go back through the 
course of ages and to rub out the twelve or thirteen 
centuries of Catholic evolution, because of the conse- 
quences, fatal in their estimation, of the principle of 
authority, one could not invoke any exception against 
those who are pre-concerned by the consequences of 
the principle of individualism and who seek to go back 
up the current and again to lay hold of the living unity 
of Christendom. 

Who, then, among those who still adhere to the 
religion of the supernatural, of the Incarnation of the 
Son of God and of the Redemption by the Cross, does 
not feel alarmed at the more or less insidious progress 
of the tendency that is shaking the authority of the 
Sacred Scriptures, and that is reducing to the rank of a 
mere mortal, no matter how incomparable He might 
have been, the Christ of the Expiation and bf the Jus- 
tification ? AVho has not sometimes asked himself with 
anguish whether, after all, it was not the legitimate use 
of the processes set in honor by the Reformation that 



62 purcell's "manning" refuted. 

ended in striking to the very heart the fundamental 
dogmas or rather facts of the rehgion that saves ? Are^ 
there jiot moments when the most pronomiced optimist, 
the person most convinced that the schism of the six- 
teenth century was willed by God and restored truths 
forgotten or effaced by Catholicism, questions himself 
regarding the solidity of a Church which rests on justi- 
fication by faith and on the inspiration and authority 
of the Scriptures, and who sees these two foundations 
directly attacked with the very weapons which it 
thought it made use of in their defence ? It is a pain- 
ful situation in which it seems at certain moments that 
it is necessary to choose between the very principles 
and the objects of the Reformation — ^between the 
method which it inaugurated as the only proper one in 
matters of faith and the realization of the ideal of 
Christian life which it had proposed to itself. 

It is seen that there is not question in that, as critics 
devoid of good faith have wanted to make believe, of I 
know not what romantic reaction, of a St. Martin's 
Summer of neo-Catholicism after the manner of Cha- 
teaubriand, of a need of aesthetic emotions. Whether 
wrongly or rightlj^, it is the very essence of Christianity 
that one believes to be in question, and one asks one- 
self from many points of view whether the supernatural 
in Christianity is not far safer in a Church which pro- 
fesses to be in possession of the plenitude of the means 
of grace, in a religious society over which the ages have 
passed, and which claims or which offers in the Apos- 
tolic succession, in the primacy of Peter's see, in its 
whole hierarchical organization, in all the objective 



INTRODUCTORY. 63 

realities of its worship, the threefold guarantee of unity, 
authority and perpetuity. After all, history has its 
teachings. When one sees the Anglo-Catholic move- 
ment ending, not only in the abjuration of its chief 
initiators, but in the transformation of Anglicanism; 
when one witnesses the efforts of that great Church sep- 
arated for three centuries from the centre of Roman 
unity in order to regain possession, without, however, 
paying its price, of the advantages of the Catholic sys- 
tem; when one sees it reclaim the Apostolic succession 
for its bishops, the validity of the ordination of its 
ministers, restore the Eucharistic service and even the 
sacrifice of the Mass, practise confession and the sacra- 
ment of penance, seeking to set up orders again, in 
brief, borrowing from the Papal Church all that can 
make its strength, but nothing of what would consti- 
tute an act of submission, one cannot help feeling a 
certain uneasiness. Those, then, are the revenges of 
Catholicism — revenges, no doubt, against an ecclesias- 
tical establishment which has ever borne in its consti- 
tution the germ of all contradictions, and which smacks 
of the opposing interests, doctrines and wills of the 
politicians who were its founders — and likewise in the 
heart of the classic country of individualist Protes- 
tantism; on the morrow of the great Evangelical re- 
awakening; in the presence of the upspringing of those 
non- conformist Churches that are entirely penetrated 
with the spirit of the Reformation. And that is not 
all. Our generation sees itself confronted, with an ur- 
gency from day to day more imperious, by a whole 
order of questions in which the very principle of indi- 



64 purcell's "manning" refuted. 

vidualism seems in advance to have been disabled from 
fighting. 

In this great social evolution of which all have a 
presentiment, certain symptoms of which are already 
making themselves felt, which must be brought about 
at any price if our social organisms want to spare them- 
selves a revolution and if justice be truly the reason for 
their existence, is it indeed the Christianity of the 
Reformation that will be able to play the part of leaven 
and of spiritual ferment? Will it bring forth at the 
right time, not only Ch. Secretans, thinkers who will 
state the problem and who will study it under all its 
aspects, but Mannings and Gibbonses, those pillars of 
the Church's power, whenever there is poverty to be 
assuaged and charity to be organized ? I well know 
that Protestantism has had its Shaftesbury; but will 
the miracle of a truly divine big-heartedness combined 
with un equaled narrowness of thought, that alliance or 
that alloy of heroic charity with a sort of morbid 
shrinking of the mind, be found again ? and, if it were 
found again, would it suffice for our time ? In fine, is 
there not in souls at this time, side by side with the 
passion for enjoyments and dilettantism, a need of re- 
nunciation, asceticism, discipline, obedience, holy and 
secluded life, activity and contemplation, regulated and 
cloistered, as it is ever felt in the epochs of decadence 
and of dissolution or of moral and social decomposition, 
v/hen they have still in them a germ of resurrection and 
of life, — as in the fourth and fifth centuries of our era? 
— needs that are not perhaps incompatible with the 
very spirit of the Reformation, but which, however, can 



INTRODUCTORY. 65 

at present hardly find organized and regular satisfaction 
outside of Catholicism ? 

Monachism has its place in the Catholic system; and 
I do not know whether the Protestant system, even by 
modifying it on essential points, would find a place for 
it. And as for those mystical needs of a closer union, 
of a more complete penetration, of a possession at the 
same time more immediate and more objective, are not 
the sacraments such as the Catholic Church honors and 
administers them better calculated to quench a thirst 
than it could be satisfied by the commemorations to 
which Protestantism — at least outside of Luther's 
Church — has too often reduced the most solemn acts of 
the religious life ? 

Without belittling the austere grandeur that is some- 
times assumed by the Reformed worship, when it does 
not remotely ape the externals of Catholic ceremonies, 
and when the imagination knows how to trace the his- 
torical causes of that simphcity and of that bareness, I 
may be allowed to say that one feels on every side in 
Protestantism the need of profound renovation. A 
form of worship presenting the daily repetition of the 
great drama of the Expiation, with the incessantly re- 
newed symbols of the single Sacrifice of the Cross, with 
the majestic accents of a liturgy whose roots plunge 
into the heart of a primitive Christendom, with a con- 
stant attestation of the Communion of Saints and of the 
indefectible union of the Church of Christ, seems better 
adapted to attract and to hold souls weary of the sub- 
tleties of analysis, of the dryness of reason and of the 
sophistry of doubt. I do not consider myself the only 
5 



66 purcell's ''manning" refuted. 

one feeling all that, and feeling it strongly; and yet it 
is certain that, while sometimes experiencing a sort of 
intellectual and moral haunting, while sometimes ask- 
ing whether one is not resisting his conscience, no one 
hitherto has been able either to throw off a painful un- 
certainty or especially to decide on one of those irre- 
vocable steps that are lawful only when they are forced. 
Undoubtedly, it is good to say to oneself that at a 
certain height the most divergent lines meet; that there 
is a level at which a St. Augustine, a St. Vincent de 
Paul, a Pascal and a Manning are inundated with the 
same rays of light and glory and make the same 
triumphant chants resound as do a Luther, a Coligny, 
a Franke, a Vinet and a Shaftesbury. It is sweet to 
recall with what sovereign breadth certain great Chris- 
tians have been pleased to forget their secondary dis- 
agreements and to celebrate their accord on the funda- 
mental points of faith, like that venerable priest of 
the diocese of Paris who felt himself pressed to associ- 
ate in his sacerdotal jubilee the prayers of his friend, a 
Protestant pastor. All that is beneficent; but one must 
not indulge in fictions too agreeable nor take refuge in 
a sort of cloudy idealism. Have we not just witnessed 
the failure of one of those premature attempts, in which 
the desire for conciliation gains the upper hand over 
the search for conditions of agreement; in which some 
one says: Peace, peace, where there is no peace, and 
which necessarily end, in spite of the best intentions, 
in the most complete broils ? On February 14, 1895, 
Lord Halifax said to the members of the English 
Church Union at Bristol that union with Rome is desir- 



INTRODUCTORY. 67 

able, is possible. He expressed a wish to see the 
Church of Rome raake to the Anglican Church over- 
tures calculated to bring on corporate reunion. Leo 
XIII. 's letter ''Ad Anglos " was in a certain sense the 
Sovereign Pontiff's answer to this request, and some 
have been able to say that they heard in it the voice of 
a father. Ardent souls conceived the hope of a prompt 
return of the Anghcan Church to unity with Rome. 
Great illusions were- entertained, chimeras were fostered 
even, until the Encyclical ' ' Satis Cognitum ' ' came to 
formulate the conditions necessary for any reconcilia- 
tion, and to reiterate with the authority of the successor 
of St. Peter the lesson that Manning had already given 
in his Pastoral of 1866 to the compromise intermedi- 
ators. Between Catholicism, even when it is repre- 
sented by a Leo XIIL, and Protestantism, even when 
it has reduced to a minimum its profession of the prin- 
ciples of the Reformation and strives, hke the Anglican- 
ism of Lord Halifax, to follow a via media equally 
distant from Rome and from Geneva, any dealing is 
hardly possible; it seems that it is necessary to submit 
or to fight. That is an acknowledgment that one is 
sometimes compelled to make to oneself, after having 
most sincerely dreamt of factitious agreements or of 
alliances against nature — vain illusions. 

The Churches of the Reformation and the Catholic 
Church no doubt have in common the eternal Chris- 
tianity, that which makes the deposit of revelation and 
of faith — but under what different, or rather contrary, 
forms is this common basis dissimulated! Truly, 
there is no halfway halting between the temple and the 



68 PURCELL^S ^'manning" REFUTED. 

cathedral. It is deliberate, conscious choice between 
the two that one ought to know how to look in the face. 
If ever this painful alternative be imposed upon one of 
us, may God keep him from ever forgetting what he 
owes to the religion of the fathers! It is to them, it is 
often to a father, in the singular, that a son owes the 
little Christianity that makes him live. Therein for 
some consists the inner drama that is brutally turned 
to advantage by controversialists who see in all that 
only a matter for controversy. Can it not sometimes 
happen that it is for being faithful to the spirit, to the 
lessons, to the principles of those to whom one owes 
the knowledge of salvation, that one feels tempted to 
show oneself unfaithful to his teaching ? 

The guilt would consist in acting with levity; in pay- 
ing attention to other words than those of conscience; 
in rejecting the memory of those great effects of grace 
that have stood out prominently in the communion in 
which one was bom; in repudiating the memory of 
those generous, chivalrous, honest and pure lives, 
entirely devoted to the service of God and of men, of 
those still more glorious dead in whom the power of 
divine life has been manifested with incomparable 
strength. When one's heart is in the right place, one 
scarcely risks giving all his weight to these considera- 
tions; but it would be none the less culpable to plug 
one's ears with sentimental reminiscences and not to 
listen to the imperious appeal of conscience, if ever it 
says to you: The work of demolition is going on; to 
others perhaps it brings no danger, but not to you; the 
supernatural in Christianity, the dogmas of the Gospel 



INTRODUCTORY. 69 

vanish under the scalpel of the higher criticism; the 
object of faith, all objective religion, is reduced to the 
nebulous state; theology gives us a Bible whose dis- 
jointed pieces require to be printed in different colors, 
and which scholars only, after close research, will still 
be able to read with discernment; it presents to us an 
impalpable, intangible Christ, a sort of twilight phan- 
tom, fallen at the same time from His divinity and 
from His humanity, without historical reality in the 
past, without celestial reality in the present, without 
supernatural reality in the sacraments. The cup that 
is offered to us is full of a deadly beverage — let us re- 
ject this poison! Like the woman in the Gospel, rather 
than let Christ escape, perhaps it will be necessary for 
our generation to take hold of the hem of His garment; 
perhaps it will be even necessary for it to follow in 
the footsteps of His disciples, even were it only to be 
touched by that shadow of Peter healing the sick of 
Jerusalem. 



PART SECOND. 



MANNING AS A PROTESTANT. 



A FEY/ months apart, four years ago,* there died in 
England two old men, loaded with days and with 
works, two cardinals of the holy Roman Church, two 
of the men w^ho, in this faithless age, and in a country 
separated from the centre of unity since the Reforma- 
tion, contributed most to restoring Catholicism to a 
place of honor and giving back to it the prestige and 
authority of one of the greatest spiritual forces of our 
time. One of these two great deceased passed away 
from the exhaustion of extreme old age in a monastic 
house in a suburb of Birmingham, and the modest 
coffin of that Oratorian — v/hom the purple, coming to 
him late in life, had not drawn out of his studious re- 
treat — received the homage of the pick of intellectual 
England, proud to salute in John Henry Newman one 
of the masters of that bold controversialism, of that 
subtle psychology and of that fearless logic the im- 
perishable model of which, on certain points, was sup- 
plied by Pascal, and which subjects reason to an appar- 
ent skepticism only to cast it at the foot of the Cross. 
The other, not so old, but worn out by the fatigues of 

* This was written in the spring of 1896. 

(70) 



MANNING AS A PROTESTANT. 71 

devouring activity and by the practices of strict asceti- 
cism, heaved his last sigh in that plain house in West- 
minster where he had wished to fix his archi episcopal 
residence. He expired almost at the same hour as the 
young Duke of Clarence; and one might have believed 
that, in a profoundly loyalist and monarchical, and 
moreover Protestant, nation, both in name and in tra- 
ditions, the regrets caused by the premature end of the 
heir presumptive to the crown would have scarcely left 
room for mourning this octogenarian, this pervert from 
Anglicanism, this head of English Catholicism. None 
the less on that account did his funeral assume the im- 
posing, sublime, unique character of a great popular 
demonstration. It w^as a whole people — the people of 
work, of poverty and of suffering — that arose to mourn 
a hero of charity. 

That, assuredly, was a sight w^hich scarcely any one 
had expected in the England of the last decade of the 
nineteenth century. No one, so much as the former 
of these princes of a Church w^hose communion Eng- 
land deserted three and a half centuries ago, had 
buffeted proud reason; had heaped scorn on practical 
materialism; had disdained or rather ignored those im- 
provements so much boasted of, those famous mechan- 
ical inventions, those pretended conquests of science, 
blind admiration for which constitutes almost entirely 
the religion of many of our contemporaries. No one 
had given as much scandal as Cardinal Manning to that 
Anglicanism of which he had formerly been the pillar 
and the hope, to that vulgar Liberalism w^hich sees no 
enemy but in the Church, and no liberty but in the 



72 purcell's ''manning" eefuted. 

oppression of consciences, to that stiff and formal 
clericalism from which he had freed himself by the 
very power of his religious and ecclesiastical convic- 
tions, to that economical orthodoxy, in fine, whose 
commonplaces are so agreeable to the egoism of certain 
classes, and in violating all of whose laws and disputing 
all of whose principles he had often seemed to take 
pleasure. And that is not all. Both of those reno- 
vators of Catholicism had gone out from Protestantism 
after having rent it asunder. The first half of their 
lives, in the one case as in the other, had been devoted 
to the service of the Anglican Church, in the ranks of 
its clergy. Both of them, though in different degrees, 
had been leaders of a party; they had fought for the 
Church of their fathers, against Rome and its preten- 
tions. They had stopped souls on the incline of deser- 
tion and of submission to the authority of the Vicar of 
Jesus Christ. It was one of them who had inaugurated 
and for twelve years directed that great Anglo- Catholic 
movement, the command of which the second picked 
up and held for some time after it had fallen from the 
faithless hands of the commander-in-chief, when the 
latter passed over to the enemy in 1845. It was they 
who had given the impetus to that great current whose 
wave at last cast them in spite of themselves on the 
opposite shore, but not until after they had fertilized 
the hitherto rather sterile and unyielding soil of Angli- 
canism, and had made a whole harvest of piety, 
spiritual life and works of charity germinate there. 

We see how, by one of those bounds that defy calcu- 
lation and confound reason, England, after all Pro- 



MANNING AS A PROTESTANT. 73 

testant, Anglican and especially anti-Papal, has cele- 
brated and honored in these two men two of the greatest 
enemies of those compromises that are dear to her in 
religion as well as in politics, two revolutionists resolved 
on overthrowing, in the name of the absolute, that 
regime of the ecclesiastical mean to which she is so 
strongly attached. The history of these two lives can 
alone explain this apparent paradox. Truly, these 
biographies, if we add to them that of Pusey and of 
some other personages of secondary rank, properly con- 
stitute the entire historv of Anelo-Ca^tholicism. 

I do not pretend to write it here. I can do nothing 
now but draw a hasty sketch of a stibject which, like 
Jansenism in the seventeenth century, would require, 
in order to be treated as it deserves, conscientious eru- 
dition, delicate psychology, the incomparable method 
of Sainte-Beuve in his ' ' Port-Koyal. ' ' This great 
memory, this perilous analogy, impresses itself upon 
any one who has penetrated even but a little way into 
the study of that great religious movement, which tra- 
verses the history of contemporary England as the Jan- 
senist movement traverses the history of France under 
Louis XIII. and Louis XIV. Yes, this agitation, in- 
augurated by a few young members of the university 
and parish clergy, without any other headquarters 
than the common hall of the Fellows or tutors of Oriel 
College, without any other leader than an obscure 
young priest whose genius had not yet been revealed 
to himself, and who had scarcely broken loose from the 
tightened bonds of the Protestantism called Evangelical, 
produced in the religion and society of England, I 



74 purcell's ''manning" refuted. 

make bold to say, a revolution that is no less extensive 
and no less profound than that brought about at the 
same time in the body politic by the great Parliamen- 
tary reform. It is radically impossible, without taking 
a somewhat accurate view of Anglo-Catholicism, to 
form a correct idea of modern England — I mean of 
political, social and literary England quite as much as 
of religious, ecclesiastical and moral England. If one 
has every reason to say: There is an England preced- 
ing and an England following the Reform Act of 1832, 
one can and one ought to say: There is an England 
preceding and an England following the ' ' Tracts for 
the Times." Keble's famous sessional sermon, the 
condemnation of Tract No. 90, the censuring of Ward, 
Newman's conversion and that of Manning, are dates 
not only in the history of the Oxford movement, but in 
that of England in the nineteenth century. 

It is this which explains why the English public 
cannot grow weary of hearing reference made to that 
drama of the religious conscience. Since the day, now 
already far distant, y/hen Newman, in order to repel 
Kingsley's gross insinuations, wrote the "Apologia 
pro Vita Sua, ' ' a masterpiece of spiritual autobiography, 
of psychological analysis, of intellectual subtlety and 
of moral candor, worthy to appear alongside of St. 
Augustine' s ' ' Confessions, ' ' how many publications of 
all sorts — memoirs, correspondence, lives, historical 
essays, mere articles — have accumulated on that inex- 
haustible theme ? There is still wanting, no doubt, the 
master work that will collect all these scattered ele- 
ments, that will group all these materials and that will 



MANNING AS A PROTESTANT. 75 

raise the definitive edifice, in proper proportions and 
on solid foundations. The interesting, but incomplete 
and hasty, abridgment written by Dean Church, of St. 
Paul's, cannot pass for having filled this gap. Per- 
haps it never will be filled. Perhaps, if it be not too 
presumptuous to acknowledge such an ambition here, 
it will be from whence it might be least expected — from 
outside, by a foreign hand — that the wished-for work 
will come. In the meantime this summary sketch and 
the monumental biographies of Newman, Pusey, and 
now of Manning, already enable us to take in vast hor- 
izon expanses at a glance. The dii minores, the Kebles, 
the AYards, the Richard Hurrell Froudes, the Eobert 
and Henry Wilberforces, the Isaac Williamses, the 
Charles Marriotts, those twelve good men of whom Dean 
Burgon has left us a portrait gallery, have been exposed 
in full daylight. As for memoirs, they abound: Pal- 
mer's recollections, J. B. Mozle3^'s letters, Thomas 
Mozley's babbling and tattling reminiscences, that far 
from edifying ^' Ana" of a religious cenacle, that par- 
ading behind the scenes of a Church party by an eccle- 
siastic who is worldly and passably skeptic, in spite, or 
rather because, of his cloth. 

The confessions of the shipwrecked of Anglo-Catholi- 
cism must be put in a separate class. Unfortunates 
were they who felt Newman's influence just enough to 
repudiate the agreeable compromises and the conveni- 
ences of the ofiicial and current religion, not enough to 
spring forward and plant themselves solidly on the rock 
of dogmatism, of the faith of authority; who became 
inoculated with the mystic fever only to reawaken shiv- 



76 puecell's ''manning" refuted. 

ering and prostrated after the attack, and whom a pass- 
ing wave of Cathohcism let fall back into discouraged 
skepticism or militant agnosticism. Such was Francis 
Newman, John Henry's younger brother, a restless, 
wandering spirit, at first a missionary in Persia, then a 
Deist in England; in every respect the opposite of his 
glorious elder brother, to whom, however, he was 
united by one of those paradoxical resemblances arising 
from the similarity of special traits and from the con- 
trast of the whole. He is the author of ' ' Phases of 
Faith ' ' and of that curious and sorry pamphlet which 
he thought he had to lay on his brother's scarcely closed 
tomb. Such also was James Anthony Froude, the his- 
torian, the younger brother of Richard Hurrell, who 
grew up at Newman's knees, for a long time the most 
fervent of disciples and the most docile of novices, 
whom the ' ' Nemesis of Faith ' ' carried off far from 
that sheltered port, out upon the stormy sea, who was 
at last cast by the reflux into Carlyle's arms, to be 
healed by that apostle of agnostic stoicism, but so im- 
perfectly healed as to have made of the work of his life 
— his ' ' History of England in the Sixteenth Century ' ^ 
— a gigantic diatribe against Catholicism. Such, in 
fine, was Mark Pattison, who died as rector of Lincoln 
College, Oxford, a soured, or rather withered soul, 
still less on account of the miscalculations or the delays 
of his university ambition than by reason of his great 
spiritual mishap — that public coach not being at hand 
to bring him to abjure Protestantism along with his 
master, and, by the same chance, failing him all his 
life, his falling into systematic doubt, into malicious 



MANNING AS A PROTESTANT. 77 

erudition after the manner of Bayle, into haughty crit- 
icism and superfine irony like Renan's — with those 
' ' Memoirs, ' ' as the chief work of that long life of stu- 
dious leisure, in which he has traced the darkest, the 
most melancholy, the most harrowing picture of a 
dried-up intellect, of an arid heart, voluntarily shriv- 
eled and yet forever inconsolable on account of the 
ideal formerly glimpsed at, half possessed, lost forever. 
It is to this rich gallery that Mr. Purcell has Just 
added as an authorized contribution the two massive 
volumes of his biography of Manning. This work was 
awaited with impatience. It was given out that the 
Cardinal, in the closing years of his life, had opened 
his secret treasures and his archives to this writer. To 
a certain extent, an authorized biography was spoken 
of, and the executors of Manning's will did not think 
that they could, after his death, show themselves more 
greedy or more timid than he: they let Mr. Purcell 
pillage at will among the deceased's most secret papers. 
Well! this book, compiled under such favorable 
auspices, is not merely a bad book, it is a bad action. 
Manning's successor, Cardinal Vaughan, and the testa- 
mentary executors, have indignantl}^ protested against 
this publication. Though Mr. Purcell tries to defend 
himself, and though he finds supporters among those 
small minds whose greatest joy it is to see every great- 
ness lowered, he has every impartial reader against 
him. One must have read him in order to know how 
far lack of style, disconnectedness, and, in a sense, 
systematic disorder can go. His book is filled with 
scraps of letters and of diaries, cut up into fragments, 



78 purcell's ''manning" eefuted. 

into crumbs, scattered at random, transposed without 
the least regard to chronology and association of ideas. 
It sometimes resembles a manuscript whose pages, cast 
here and there by the wind, had been sown together by 
an illiterate servant girl, sometimes a paper basket uj)- 
set on a table. What are we to say of the innumerable 
errors that enamel almost every page and that give 
every reason to be surprised at an English writer, a 
Catholic, who had devoted years to these studies ? To 
imagine that the emancipation of the Catholics was still 
on the order of the day in 1830; to persist in calling 
the Tractarians Puseyites before 1835, at a time when 
Pusey had scarcely given his valuable adhesion to New- 
man publicly, and when he had the honor of attaching 
his name to his party only after 1845; to betray in 
every word an inconceivable ignorance of Oxford, and 
of the affairs and the men of the University; to be 
scarcely able to" touch on a point of the history of 
Anglo-Catholicism, or even of the general, religious or 
political history of England, without getting lost in a 
lab3^rinth of inaccuracies and contradictions; to go out 
of his way in dishonoring Latin quotations with gross 
barbarisms; in fine, to write in a dull style, oscillating 
between the emphatic and the commonplace — these are 
some of Mr. Purcell's sins. They would be venial in 
my estimation if they stood alone. The inexcusable 
thing is, that a man to whom Manning had opened the 
most secret registers of his papers and of his heart, who 
lived in familiar, intimate intercourse with a great soul, 
takes it upon himself as a mission to interlard his ex- 
tracts and his summaries with outrageous commentaries 



MANNING AS A PROTESTANT. 79 

and perfidious insinuations; that he systematically 
gives an unfavorable interpretation to all the words, all 
the acts, all the silences of his hero; that he gratuitously 
attributes to him egoism, ambition, jealousy, duplicity, 
love for and art in intrigue, nay even cowardice, and all 
equally morbid and ignoble; that he uses his own 
errors of fact or his gross confusion of ideas as a text 
upon which to calumniate him upon whom he pretends 
to pass judgment — that, it will be acknowledged, is 
something more than readers will imagine; that also, I 
think, is something that exceeds a biographer's right. 
Mr. Purcell, moreover, becomes so very unconscionable 
that he professes, perhaps sincerely, a great admiration 
for the man whom he has just treated in this way. 
His code of literary proprieties is also quite strange. 
In order to prove his gratitude to Mr. Gladstone, of old 
closely allied with Manning, and who lavished confi- 
dences and revelations on his friend's biographer, he 
dubs him in passing with the amiable surname of 
Judas. He entertained no scruple about publishing 
either letters expressly placed under the seal of the 
strictest confidence, or documents calculated to re- 
awaken old quarrels between the dead or to provoke 
new ones between the living. 

Such an author rules himself out of court. It is not 
thus that one writes history. As to knowing whether 
he ought to have been prevented from causing this 
scandal, shall I dare to acknowledge to my shame that 
I am not free from rejoicing at some of the results of 
his indelicacy ? Felix culpa, since, with whatever in- 
tention he has acted, Mr. Purcell, like Froude of old 



80 puecell's "manning" refuted. 

with that realist and impressionist, Carlyle, who so 
greatly shocked the Sage of Chelsea's friends, has given 
us, in the fragmentary state, in absolute disorder, an 
incomparable series of revelations, of original docu- 
ments; a Manning painted by himself; involuntary 
avowals, touches and retouches, the authentic confes- 
sions of a soul of the first rank. It is furthermore an- 
nounced that, by way of refutation, the executors of 
the Cardinal's will and his closest friends will ere long 
pubhsh an official version of his Hfe. These post- 
humous controversies, however painful they may be, 
often make the light shine. Even after Mr. Purcell's 
rich, insolent and indiscreet reaping, with its badly 
bound sheaves, there still remain indeed some ears to 
be gleaned. In the meantime, we have already, be- 
sides some important review articles published after 
Manning's death and a small work by Miss Harriet 
King, in Mr. Hutton's modest little book a work from 
which Mr. Purcell could have .learned that, in order to 
avoid the continuous panegyric of the hves of the saints 
and the affecting colorings of the order of hagiography, 
there is no need of indulging in satire or disparagement. 



It was in 1832 that Henry Edward Manning, then 
twenty-four years old, presented himself for ordination 
and entered the ranlis of the Anglican clergy. His first 
vocation did not call him to it. Born on July 16, 
1808, the last child by the second marriage of a rich 
merchant of the City of London, William Manning, 
who sat in Parliament among the Tories, Henry Ed- 



MANNIXG AS A PROTESTANT. 81 

ward had indeed been intended by his parents for the 
clerical calling. The family, of good connections among 
the country gentry, was respectably religious; but this 
project had been inspired in Manning's parents much 
less by views of piety than by the desire and hope of 
procuring for their Benjamin a comfortable and safe 
living. The child himself did not show any taste for 
this profession. In the preparatory schools which he 
frequented, and at Harrow, to which he went at the 
age of fifteen, he was npt a studious pupil. He dis- 
tinguished himself more at cricket than in the school 
exercises. Yet these four years in one of the great 
public schools which, along with Eton, Eugby and 
Winchester, receive the pick of English youth, were 
not useless to him. AVellington was fond of saying 
that it was on the Eton school play-grounds that the 
victory of Waterloo had been won. In any case, there 
comes out of those establishments, and only therefrom, 
that special product known as the English gentleman. 
Manning was such all his life in the full meaning of 
the term. This indescribable quality was always lack- 
ing to Newman, his equal by birth, his superior in the 
gifts of the intellect, but who did not pass through one 
of those great schools. 

In 1827, when his son left Harrow, William Man- 
ning's fortune was already impaired. A minimum of 
from twelve to fourteen hundred dollars a year was 
needed to provide for the young student's support at 
Oxford. The father hesitated, and Manning had to 
swear to make up for lost time and to go and take an 
intermediate course from a clergyman; and to his so- 
6 



82 purcell's "manning" refuted. 

journ at this man's house he ever afterwards attributed 
the sohdity of the foundations of his knowledge of the 
classics and his success at Oxford. At the age of 
twenty he was matriculated in Balliol College. Ambit- 
ious as he was, — he took for his motto, as we learn 
from one of his letters: Aut Csesar aut nihil, — he resolved 
to stand abreast with the pick of his generation. His 
conscientious application found its reward. In the 
Michaelmas examinations (November, 1830) he won a 
first class or the diploma of Jionor for the classical 
studies to which he had. confined his desires. Never- 
theless, it was in another direction that, during these 
years at Oxford, he specially distinguished himself. 

The Union, or conference of the students, had just 
been founded. That wrangling societ}^, that parlia- 
ment in miniature, which, along with its rival of Cam- 
bridge, has seen nearly all the eminent men of England 
sit on its benches, had a modest and frugal beginning, 
not in the sumptuous hall in which it now frequently 
attracts to its oratorical jousts members of Parliament 
and ministers of State, but in the contracted quarters 
of the students. Samuel Wilberforce, the son of the 
great philanthropist, the future Anglican prelate, — 
Golden-mouthed Samuel or Soapy Sam, according to the 
point of view wdiich one takes in order to appreciate 
him, — ^had just vacated the presidency. There William 
Ewart Gladstone was about to serve his apprenticeship 
in eloquence. Manning spoke a great deal; he spoke 
well; he spoke on all subjects et de quibusdam aliis, from 
the great questions of general politics to the smallest 
details of the interior of a household. 



MANNING AS A PROTESTANT. 83 

A witty and sharp pen, that of the late Lord Hough- 
ton, has described one of the most memorable days of 
that time. Cambridge also had its Union, and, ever in 
rivalry with Oxford, prided itself on its superiority 
over the barbarians of the sister University. On the 
banks of the Isis they were still admiring in Bj^ron the 
poet of the age and of youth, whilst on the banks of 
the Cam, Shelley's more recent and more heterodox 
renown had already eclipsed the name of the singer of 
' ' Manfred ' ' and of ' ' Childe Harold. ' ' At the sugges- 
tion of Arthur Hallam, the son of the historian, the 
very youth on whom a premature death was to confer 
immortality by giving to his friend Tennyson the 
opportunity of erecting to his memory the monument 
of ' ' In Memoriam, ' ' a delegation of missionaries was 
charged to go and cast defiance at the Oxford Byron- 
ians in the name of the poet of '-Prometheus Un^ 
bound ' ' and of the ' ' Epipsychidion. ' ' Hallam him- 
self, Moncton Milnes, the future Lord Houghton, the 
essayist and distinguished poet, and last, Sunderland, 
one of those great men of twenty whom destiny pun- 
ishes for their precociousness, went to plead this cause, 
Gladstone served as introducer to the revolutionists. 
The contest was epic and passionate, with those savory 
exaggerations that are the charm and honor of youth. 
No one will ever know which side won the victory. If 
the majority gave their votes to Manning, the uncom- 
promising defender of Byron, he declared later on that 
the arguments of the trio of Shelleyites had routed him. 

Those fine times of disinterested study, of generous 
enthusiasm, of pure friendships, pass but too quickly. 



84 purcell's ''manning" refuted. 

It was necessary to enter upon practical life. Man- 
ning's vocation at this period was quite decided. Poli- 
tics attracted him, took entire hold of him. He dreamt 
of Parliament, of oratorical successes, of power, of ac- 
tion. He already saw himself Prime Minister, and his 
Oxford comrades, if they had taken his horoscope and 
that of Gladstone, would have reserved the mitre and 
crozier for the latter and given the seals of State to the 
future Archbishop of Westminster. Fate decided other- 
wise. William Manning was a ruined man. He had 
had, with a broken heart, to close up his business, to 
send in his resignation as a regent of the Bank of Eng- 
land, of which he had even been governor for some 
time, and as a member of the House of Commons, and 
to sell his fine country-seat. It was not with the crumbs 
of the paternal patrimony that one could meet the ex- 
penses of a Parliamentary career, such as Manning 
dreamt of — after the English fashion, in which one 
gives his leisure and his revenues to the service of the 
country, instead of supporting himself or making his 
fortune in one of the services. Thus discouraged, from 
the careless patronage of Lord Goderich Manning had 
to accept a more than modest place of supernumerary 
in the Colonial ofUce. 

He was pressed to reflect, to adopt the calling of the 
Church rather than to enter the civil service by this 
low back door. He refused. His religious feelings 
were far from being intense. There were found in him 
none of those strange presentiments, of that congenital, 
almost morbid, mysticism, that hidden and ardent 
spiritual life, after the manner of St. Teresa, of that 



MANNING AS A PROTESTANT. 85 

species of half-waking dream, the indehble picture of 
which has been left to us by Newman and which 
marked him in advance, as if by a miracle, in the very 
heart of Protestantism, for Catholicism and the priest- 
hood. The awakening of the religious conscience, the 
conversion^ if I may use the technical term of Protestant 
psychology, was brought about in Manning by a fem- 
inine influence. He was connected with a great bank- 
ing family of the city, the Bevans. Miss Bevan was a 
thoroughly religious soul, profoundly impregnated with 
the piety and the theology of that school of Evangeli- 
calism, whose influence I will have to characterize. She 
read the Bible, she prayed along with the young man; 
in short, she was the instrument which God made use 
of to touch that heart and to conquer that soul. This 
was only a beginning ; we will see that Manning made 
his true and complete conversion date from his malady 
of 1847 ; but its germ was none the less planted. 

It is interesting to note in passing that the two lead- 
ers of the English Catholic restoration, one as well as 
the other, owed to Evangelicalism — and one as well as 
the other so proclaimed — their birth into the spiritual 
life. Newman was for years a zealous adherent not 
only of the religious school, but of the ecclesiastical 
party of that name. He founded and directed for some 
time at Oxford one of the specific institutions of this 
form of Protestantism, an auxiliary committee of the 
Bible Society. He himself, in his ''Apologia," in 
which he weighed each expression, has declared that 
he in a certain sense ov/ed his soul — the phrase is a 
strong one — to Scott's arch-Protestant Bible commen- 



86 puroell's "manning" refuted. 

tary. Manning also, even after his public adhesion to 
the Oxford movement, remained in communion with 
some of the chief members of the Evangelical party. 
In that there is an important fact. These two cardinals, 
these two athletes of Catholicism, not only began with 
Protestantism, but with what was most Protestant in 
Protestantism. Their own testimony assures us that 
both of them preserved a memory, nay more, an indel- 
ible trace of it. Certainly, when they submitted to the 
Church, and by that very act, they repudiated every- 
thing that in their eyes constituted the errors and the 
sin of schism and heresy; but the experience of the 
past in that regard none the less remained to them. 
They knew, they knew personally, all the good, the 
excellence, the truth, that a false system can conceal. 
They knew, they knew of themselves, that even in 
militant, irreconcilable Protestantism, however far from 
entirely faithful to the Gospel and docile to Revelation 
it may be, there is the germ of all the truths, including 
those that it rejects and that form the crowning of 
Catholicism. To them, certain methods of controversy 
to which controversy on the Continent is too often low- 
ered, were altogether impossible : they could not have 
recourse to them without contradicting themselves and 
calumniating their own past. 

At that time, however, Manning had not yet come 
to this. He had just received the spark that was to 
light in him, never again to be extinguished, the sacred 
fire of the mind. His father's ruin, with all that it 
entailed for him, was the first call to a higher vocation. 
A secret sorrow — a prudent father's refusal to authorize 



MAJJ^NING AS A PROTESTANT. 87 

the union, more dreamt of than sohcited, of a young 
supernumerary in the Colonial office with his daughter 
— came to complete the work that had been begun. 
The voices from on high gained the upper hand. He 
has himself described, in a letter of that period to his 
confidential friend, his brother-in-law, the sickly, wild, 
soured, enraged, indolent, ill-at-ease condition of his 
soul; his need of being anywhere else than where he 
was, of doing, of hearing everything else than w^hat he 
was doing or hearing ; in a word, of being everything 
else than what he was : a coarse, stupid, monstrous 
body, some creature or other. His melancholy some- 
times degenerated into a sort of skeptical cynicism : 
Everything is false, soul or body, mechanism or clap- 
trap. Ah! philosophy! let us speak of it : Vitas magis- 
tra, dodrinarum excuUrix, artium indagairix, etc. Yes, 
truly, when everything is nice and quite warm and 
comfortable, oh! then it is the most faithful of friends, 
the best of companions, of counselors, of consolers, of 
protectors. But when things assume a mean aspect, 
well! there it is gone, its tail in the air, like a cow too 
well fed, in a time of storm. It was only a well-known 
form of the malady of growth : an acute attack of 
Byronism or of Wertherism, complicated with a too 
natural discouragement at the sight of that world, all 
of whose avenues were shut against the hopes or the 
ambitions of his twenty-five years. 

Manning knew later on how to discern the Providential 
hand that was inflicting all these deceptions upon him 
at the very hour when an internal travail had begun in 
his soul, the voice that was speaking to him a language 



88 purcell's ''manning" refuted. 

so clear and so exalted. He resolved, and it is he him- 
self who tells us so, not to become a clergyman in the 
sense dreamt of by his father, but to renounce the 
world and to live for God and for souls. And he adds 
that he had prayed a great deal, had much frequented 
the churches. It was the turning point of his life. I 
pity those who, hke Mr. Purcell and certain of his 
critics, see only a sort of last shift and of purely mun- 
dane speculation in the determination that could be 
traced by Manning himseK in these words so simple 
and so beautiful: It was an appeal from God quite as 
clearly as any one of those that He afterwards addressed 
to him, an appeal ad veritatem et ad seipsum. 

The proof that he was not obeying purely human 
motives is, as he has noted, that the mere thought of 
being a clergyman was of itself odious to him. He 
says that he had a veritable antipathy against the secu- 
lar character, the worldliness of the Established Church. 
The sight of the stock and cap (insignia of the Angli- 
can bishops) literally put him beside himself. The 
title, father in God, applied to bishops living in com- 
fort, keenly irritated him. His only thought was to 
obey God's will, to save his soul and the souls of 
others. 

Manning had the good fortune of having been placed 
from the beginning in an extremely favorable position. 
Scarcely had he been ordained by the Bishop of Oxford, 
after the ludicrous preparation that sufficed at that 
time for the Anglican clergy, when he became, in Jan- 
uary, 1833, one of the vicars under the Reverend John 
Sargent, rector of Lavington and lord of the manor, his 



MANNING AS A PROTESTANT. 89 

relative by marriage. The eldest daughter of the 
family had already married Samuel Wilberforce, the 
future bishop, recently appointed rector of a parish in 
the Isle of Wight. It was the destiny of these girls to 
reward the zeal of their father's youthful assistants. A 
few months had scarcely elapsed when the youngest of 
them, Caroline, became Manning's wife. Since the 
month of May, Manning, on the death of his intended 
father-in-law, had been entrusted by his betrothed' s 
grandmother, who reigned at the castle and owned the 
right of presentation, in charge of this important 
parish. At twenty-five, after an apprenticeship of 
scarcely more than a few weeks, Manning found him- 
self in the position of a beneficed priest, which so many 
members of the clergy never reach. Married, with a 
competent income, in a high station, he was in a most 
enviable position. 

This very good fortune had its dangers. Who 
knows, in case it should have been prolonged, whether 
the rector of Lavington, the husband of an accom- 
plished woman, perhaps surrounded by children, in 
possession of a handsome revenue, at the head of an 
important parish, on the road to dignities, would not 
gradually have fallen to the level of that comfortable, 
respectable, honest, kindly, well incomed, well fed 
clergy which necessarily furnishes good fathers of 
famihes, few ascetics or saints, and which believes 
more in the wise precepts of orthodox political economy 
than in the divine folly of charity? God preserved 
him from this danger. ITe left to him the shell of his 
happiness, that eminent position, that luxury, those 



90 purcell's "manning" refuted. 

horses that he loved and in the knowledge of which he 
excelled, all that external decoration which Manning 
himself repelled with a firm hand as soon as he had 
taken his first steps on the way of renunciation; but He 
struck him straight to the heart. 

After four years of cloudless felicity, his wife was 
taken from him. Manning has not allowed any one to 
fathom his sorrow. There are feelings too sacred for a 
man to speak of them. Manning was never one of 
those who profane the secrecy of their memories, who 
make a public place of the sanctuary of their affections, 
who retail their heart in slices. Never, even again in 
the service of a Church which allows its ministers to 
marry, did he make a direct allusion to his loss, even 
in his correspondence with those closest to him, even 
in his secret diary. He briefly refers to this date — 
July 24, 1837 — only in the list of the charitable dis- 
pensations by which God led him to Himself. Later 
on, other reasons came to seal his silence still more 
hermetically. As a Catholic priest, as the head of a 
clergy vowed to celibacy, it was not agreeable to him to 
reawaken this memory. 

Others took charge of it for him, if we are to believe 
a legend that is perhaps devoid of authenticity. Dur- 
ing the vehement, and sometimes envenomed, struggles 
that he had to maintain against certain factions in the 
fold of Catholicism, an old priest, who detested the new 
regime, was accustomed to celebrate as a day of mourn- 
ing the anniversary of Mrs. Manning's death, and, when 
he was asked the reason for it, he answered that it was 
the date of the severest blow that God in our time had 



MANNING AS A PROTESTANT. 91 

inflicted on the Church in the British Isles.* Even as 
a married man, however, Manning had not slept in 
happiness. Side by side with an indefatigable parish 
activity, he was not slow to take his stand on the battle- 
ground of the struggle that was absorbing every mind. 

II. 

It was a solemn hour when the Oxford movement 
broke out with a din of war. The Established Church 
of England, by reason of the strange anomalies of its 
beginnings, had always concealed within it the germs 
of two contradictory systems, namely, Catholicism and 
Protestantism. The struggle between these two oppos- 
ing elements disturbed the entire first half of the seven- 
teenth century. Archbishop Laud was an Anglo- 
Catholic before his time. He contracted a fatal alliance 
with that fatal dynasty of the Stuarts, and he expiated 
on the scaffold still less his hostility against triumphant 
Puritanism than his coiiiplicity with Strafford and 
Charles I. in their abortive attempt at absolute govern- 
ment, without Parliament. Anglican theology, with 
Hooker, with Bull, with those non-jurors who were 
wrong in erecting into a dogma the purely human and 
political doctrine of legitimacy and of non-resistance, 

* Mr. Purcell, in a note on p. 310 of this volume, relates that, 
some one having said that Newman's conversion was the greatest 
calamity that the Catholic Church has suffered in our day, Canon 
MacMuUen answered in the negative, saying that the greatest mis- 
fortune to the Church of our day was the death of a woman (Mrs. 
Manning). I have personal reasons for not putting too implicit 
faith in this anecdote, and especially in a pretended subsequent 
dialogue between the Cardinal and the Canon. 



92 purcell's " manning '* refuted. 

none the less continued to repudiate Protestantism and 
its inspirations. In the eighteenth century, however, 
with the definitive victory of the revolution of 1688 and 
the accession of the house of Hanover, it is the domi- 
nance of all the powers of spiritual death, of Erastian- 
ism or of the absolute subordination of the Church to 
the State ; of practical materialism, of formalism, of 
rationalism ; of that shameful Christianity which is 
afraid of its shadow, which dreads and proscribes noth- 
ing so much as enthusiasm, which is reduced to a 
purely civil morality and observes a cowardly silence 
on revealed dogma. It was, properly speaking, the 
sleep of death. 

A reawakening of faith, of zeal, of ardor, of generous 
imprudence, was at last brought about. It took place 
outside the Anglican Church. John Wesley remained, 
indeed, until the end its faithful and devoted son. If 
he founded a new sect, Methodism, whose adherents 
are now counted by millions in the English-speaking 
world, it was in spite of him, against his personal re- 
sistance. He had wanted to touch consciences, to save 
souls, to preach the eternal Gospel; thanks to Anglican 
intolerance, he found that he had created a Church. 
The beginnings of primitive Methodism had something 
of the grandeur, of the simplicity of nascent Christian- 
ity, or, if this comparison shocks, of the foundation of 
the mendicant orders. Its apostles knew how to make 
the basic chords of the sentiment of sin and of repent- 
ance vibrate in the souls of the people, ever accessible 
to these great simple emotions. The counter-blast to 
this powerful movement made itself felt even in the 



MANNING AS A PROTESTANT. 93 

Anglican Church. Methodism and Wesley were the 
authors of that beneficent reaction of Evangelicalism 
which restored some religious sap to the Anglican 
establishment. 

Among the products of Protestantism there is none 
more authentic than Evangelicalism. Therein were its 
grandeurs and its littlenesses, its qualities and its de- 
fects. Strictly individualist, it especially appealed to 
the emotions of religious sensibility. The great affair 
to it was conversion, looked at, not as the slow and 
progressive action of the Spirit of God, operating 
through all the ordinary and extraordinary channels of 
grace on a human creature, but as an indivisible point 
in time and space, the sudden transformation of a soul, 
the miraculous and instantaneous deliverance which 
breaks the yoke of sin. From the beginning, in spite 
of the great things that were done or that were provoked 
by the new school, and to which M. de Remusat, form- 
erly and in this very place, paid eloquent homage, 
people had to acknowledge that it presented grave and 
fatal defects. It lacked the meaning of penance in the 
tragic sense which this word bore to an Augustine, a 
Saint-Cyran or a Pascal. There was wanting to it the 
notion of the Church, the conception of the sacraments, 
the consciousness of human solidarity and of divine 
authority. There was wanting to it, in fine, a theol- 
ogy, the understanding of dogma and of the place that 
belongs to it in a supernatural and revealed religion. 

These defects, however, became noticeable only in 
time. In the first instance, Evangelicalism showed it- 
self as a power of life and progress. A divine breath 



94 PURCELL' S ' ' MANNING ' ' REFUTED. 

joined again and reanimated the scattered bones of 
Anglican formalism. The clergy ceased, according to 
the witty and too just remark of Joseph de Maistre, to 
be a company of gentlemen clad in black who retailed 
honest things from the pulpit on Sunday. The clergj^- 
man, described by Macaulay, not without a trifle of 
exaggeration, as the humble parasite of the rural 
manors, the intended husband of My Lady's ex- 
chambermaid or, worse than that, of My Lord's dis- 
carded mistress, — Fielding's parson, the eater of the 
family leavings, a lettered Bohemian or a poor village 
pastor with just a bare living, — even the rectors and 
the curates, so admirably pictured in their romances 
by Jane Austen and later on by George Eliot, those 
joyous and robust country gentlemen, always the first 
. at the hunting meet, better initiated in the mj^steries of 
sport or of the turf than in those of theology, all that 
old-regime clergy began, like an antediluvian fauna, to 
disappear under the influence of Evangelicalism. 

There the reaction did not stop. The laity were even 
more affected hj it. A splendid impulse was given to 
the great undertakings of charity and philanthropy. It 
will be to the eternal honor of that doctrine which, by 
its narrow conception of salvation by faith, seemed 
destined to paralyze all religious activity, that it made 
a whole harvest of Christian works spring up : missions 
among pagans, at last cleansing Protestantism of the 
reproach of neglecting one of Christ's commandments; 
committees on aid, on popular instruction, on penal 
reform; especially that admirable movement against 
slavery and the slave trade with which the name of 
Wilberforce is connected. 



MANNING AS A PROTESTANT. 95 

Such is the balance sheet of Evangelicalism. It has 
left indelible traces, not only on the history, but on the 
moral and intellectual constitution of the English peo- 
ple. Towards the end of the first qua^rter of this 
century, it was in the zenith of power and success. 
The heroic age had passed. That great current of 
enthusiasm was in the act of being controlled, directed 
and solidified. In its turn, victorious Evangelicalism, 
caressed and professed by those who but lately were 
persecuting it, ran the risk of becoming a Pharisaism. 
It fell back into formalism, but into a formalism a 
hundred times worse, because the affectation of certain 
sentiments made a hypocrisy of it and because it 
lacked, as a compensation, the ample traditions, the 
broad perspectives, the intrinsic solidity of the sacra- 
ments of the Anglo-Catholic system. 

It was precisely the period when the progress of 
Liberalism seemed to put, if not the Church, at least the 
ecclesiastical establishment, in peril. In the order of 
thought and of knowledge, after the philosophy of the 
eighteenth century and its popular rationalism, people 
were already witnessing the first attempts of the higher 
criticism, — of that German criticism with which Pusey 
went to come in contact on that university pilgrimage 
from which he brought back such a curious book. In 
the political order, the hour was approaching for the 
triumph of the Whigs after half a century of Tory gov- 
ernment, and of extreme resistance to every novelty in 
spirituals as well as in temporals. The spirit of toler- 
ance, erroneously confounded with the spirit of skepti- 
cal indifference, thanks to the great treason of Peel and 



96 purcell's ''manning" refuted. 

Wellington, had just won a decisive victory in the 
matter of Catholic emancipation and was going to 
abolish the Tests or religious oaths. The Liberals 
openly avowed their design of reforming the Church, of 
suppressing bishoprics and prebends, of revising 
revenues and endowments, and of abolishing tithes. A 
voice coming from a very exalted station had just sum- 
moned the bishops to put their house in order. In 
fine, the accession of new layers of those middle 
classes, entirely permeated with the leprosy of Noncon- 
formity, the growing shadow cast on the insular king- 
dom by the continental revolution, were all frightening 
the faithful. The younger clergy, in particular, felt 
themselves summoned to a holy war. 

These champions cast their eyes all around them in 
order to discover means of defence. In the official 
arsenal of Anglicanism they found only rusty, moss- 
grown, worn-out weapons of the State religion and of 
political orthodoxy. As regards Evangelicalism, on the 
one side, it bargained with the enemy by communicat- 
ing with the schismatics of Protestant dissent; on the 
other, it offered only imperfectly tempered weapons, 
which flew to pieces at the first contact with the refined 
and double-edged blades of Catholic controversy or 
revolutionary polemics. If the Church of England was 
to be saved, it was necessary to find its titles again and 
to give them back to it. If it was 'to be put in shelter 
from human enterprise, it was necessary to restore to 
it the supernatural powers of its divine mission. If it 
was anything else than the creature of the State, at the 
mercy of the holders of temporal power, it was neces- 



MANNING AS A PROTESTANT. 97 

sary to restore its spiritual power, to turn it back to its 
supernatural beginnings and to bring again into light 
those notes or those authentic characters which are in- 
herent in the Church and without which there is no 
Church. The whole Oxford movement, Anglo-Cathol- 
icism in its entirety, was in germ in the perception of 
these needs. 

A few young men, for the most part connected with 
Oriel College, Oxford, felt themselves pressed to enter 
the field. Keble, formerly famous for a university 
career of unequaled brilliancy, retired in a country par- 
ish, not without a ray of glory having come to seek him 
there after the publication of his poem, ' ' The Christian 
Year, " of a poesy that was somewhat arch, but yet sin- 
cere and fresh, had just preached (July 14, 1833), at 
the opening of the Oxford sessions, that sermon on 
national apostasy in which Newman always saw the 
first clarion call of the holy war. Newman had arrived 
from that journey in Italy and Sicily, quite illuminated 
with mysterious presentiments, quite gloomy from su- 
perstitious fears, a journey that came near ending in 
the tomb. He had come in contact, not without the 
unaffected fear and the scruples of a child brought up 
in another sanctuary, with the religion of the Catholic 
world. He returned from it with the still vague intui- 
tion of a great mission, with the zeal of a renewed con- 
consecration. 

Among the friends to whom he revealed these secret 
thoughts, Richard Hurrell Froude exerted on him the 
most decisive influence. Already suffering from the 
phthisis that was to carry him off, he had the somewhat 



93 rup.cELL-s ' • MAi,'>;iXG " kefuti:d. 

feyerisli impetuosity of a man whose days are num- 
bered. Brought up in the purest traditions of the High 
Church by his father, the Archdeacon, he had gathered 
in a few morsels of the Anglo-CathoHc heritage of these 
two precursors, Alexander Knox and Bishop Jebb. In 
order to bring himself nearer to the Catholic Church, 
he had an infinitely shorter road to travel than the 
Protestant Newman, a descendant through his mother 
of Huguenot refugees and brought up in the atmosphere 
of Evangelicalism. Newman at this date still saw in 
Rome the great 'prostitute of the Apocalypse and in the 
Pope Antichrist. His imagination, saturated with the 
metaphors of Protestant controversy, persisted in sug- 
gesting to him those grotesque analogies, even when his 
reason and his conscience had brought him closer to 
Catholicism. In the beginning of his work, when he 
commenced the publication of the "Tracts for the 
Times, ' ' he was totally exempt from every predilection 
for Rome, even of the most secret character. Quite the 
contrary, he combated in it the great enemy that was 
compromising truth, every time that it did not corrupt 
it, and whose systematic undertakings, superfoetations 
and usurpations explained, if they did not justify, the 
errors, mutilations and negations of Protestantism. 

Leaning his back against his, to him, invincible the- 
ory of conformity v/ith the primitive Church and of the 
immutable deposit of faith, Newman was by no means 
afraid to hurl defiance at those two formidable powers, 
Catholicism and Protestantism. Not only did. he deem 
it possible to find between these two forms of error a 
via media, equallj^ distinct from each of them, but in 



MANNING AS A PROTESTANT. 99 

his estimation the Anglican Church was alone in pos- 
session of the monopoly of truth and of the whole truth. 
Strange and noble illusion of a thoroughly intellectualist 
genius! Newman had gone out in search of the best 
means of defence for the Church that was dear to him, 
and he had concluded that the safest, as well as the 
simplest, was to claim for it the supernatural character- 
istics of the Church in itself. To postulate for a purely 
national and insular Church, separated from the rest of 
the world, subject to the civil authority, thoroughly 
penetrated with the doctrines and rites of the Reforma- 
tion — to postulate for it the notes of the Church, one, 
eternal, immutable, infallible, visible — that is to say, 
according to Vincent of Lerins' formula, the semper . . . , 
uhique . . . , ab (ynmibus — such was the desperate under- 
taking or pledge to which, one fine day in the year of 
grace 1833, a young and obscure Fellow of Oriel devoted 
himself. On this foundation he built the edifice of the 
"Tracts for the Times," of those small periodical 
pamphlets of which he was always the inspirer, the 
reviser and the responsible editor, and most frequently 
the author. 

These leaflets were prodigiously successful. From 
to-day until to-morrow a great party was formed, 
Newman was its leader. He was famous, he was 
powerful. He was entering upon that extraordinary 
phase of his life which lasted twelve years and whose 
steps he himself noted as those of a way of the cross. 
To England was presented the unprecedented sight of a 
mere ecclesiastic, without dignity, without rank in the 
hierarchy, becoming the generalissimo of a great army, 



100 purcell's ^^ manning" refuted. 

the absolute master of a troop of devoted friends, the 
infallible oracle of a school, the director of the con- 
sciences of a multitude of penitents. It has been said 
that at that period, as regards many men of eminence, 
endowed with reason and wdll, the adequate and com- 
plete formula of their faith was : Credo in Neivmanum. 
His sermons at St. Mary's, the parish church of the 
University, were attended by immense audiences. His 
modest rooms at Oriel were a sanctuary whose thres- 
hold was not crossed without emotion. A word from 
him, nay less than that, a fugitive shadow of an ex- 
pression, a gesture, a silence, were listened to, obeyed, 
as the commands of an absolute king or the decrees of 
an infallible pontiff. Rarely has a man, either in this 
age or in any age, more completely tasted the intoxi- 
cating joys of an intellectual and moral dictatorship. 

^yhat is most emotional and pathetic in his case is 
that, for nearly all that time, the object of this adora- 
tion, the idol of this worship, is a prey to the poignant 
anguish of doubt. He sees opening beneath his feet 
the very ground on which he is building that imposing 
edifice. He sees abysses gaping on all sides of him, 
and, more unfortunate than Pascal, it is he himself 
who leads thith'er to be lost all those who have confi- 
dence in him. His logic has taken hold of him in a 
pitiless vise. It carries him, from deduction to deduc- 
tion, to starting from premises that he has laid down 
and that the unknowing multitude acclaim, to con- 
clusions in the presence of which his whole soul recedes 
in terror, which it hates, which are the overturning of 
his work, but from which he cannot in good faith with- 
draw. 



MANNING AS A PROTESTANT. 101 

Newman has left us in his ''Apologia," and in a 
more direct and still more palpitating form in his 
'' Letters," the history of that soul adventure. Rather 
early did he feel that he did not have the right to limit 
his assertions precisely to whatever they could contain 
that was useful to his cause. It would have been too 
advantageous, and not honest enough, to amputate his 
theories from all that exceeded the current conception 
of Anglicanism, to curtail all that menaced the preten- 
tions or revealed the contradictions of the Church of 
England. Accepting and invoking a part of the form- 
ula of St. Vincent of Lerins, he could not in good 
conscience reject any of it without condemning the rest. 
Did not his doctrine of the rule of Christian antiquity, 
of conformity to the primitive Church, logically imply 
Catholicism ? How were people to assert in the same 
breath that the Church is the depository and interpreter 
of revealed truth by right divine, and that she is the 
mistress of errors and the godmother of popular super- 
stitions ? By what right should people proclaim the 
infallible Church of the first three centuries, of the 
great oecumenical councils, in order to arrive at the 
conclusion of the great defection of the Church in the 
Middle Ages, at the straying of the Council of Trent? 

The fright wdth which Newman saw these questions 
arise was sincere. If his mind began to throw off the 
yoke of his Protestant prejudices, his heart and his 
imagination were still enslaved to them. In his pres- 
ence still arose this dilemma: to continue to build, on 
the foundations that he had laid, amid songs of 
triumph and exclamations of joy, the majestic Angli- 



102 purcell's ''manning" refuted. 

can cathedral, — but then to go to the end, to crown its 
summit with the cross of St. Peter and to submit to 
Rome; — or, indeed, firmly to reject the Papal preten- 
sions, to repudiate unflinchingly the extreme conse- 
quences of the Catholic system, — but then to acknowl- 
edge openly the midway theory of the via media was 
wrong, that the whole Tractarian undertaking had set 
out from a false starting point and that Geneva was 
right. It is easy to take account of what was to be 
tragical in the condition of the head of a party, devoured 
by those thoughts at the very moment and partly be- 
cause of its successes. 

To Newman, thrown back upon himself, absorbed in 
those inner struggles, it seemed that he was fated to 
strike a mortal blow at the Church, his mother, whether 
he abandoned it to go and kneel at the feet of his 
haughty enemy, or snatched from it with his own 
hands the royal crown that he had just placed on its 
head. So much filial piety necessarily ending in an 
act of parricide! This internal work was already far 
advanced when, in addition, a whole series of external 
facts, of positive, undeniable events, came to show him 
all that was imaginary, fictitious, contrary to reality, in 
his fundamental assertions. There was no longer ques- 
tion of knowing theoretically whether a Church which 
possesses — or w^hich claims — a part of the supernatural 
attributes of the ideal Church has the right, in good 
logic, to repudiate the others. To Newman there was 
question of shutting his eyes to the evidence of the facts 
or to draw from them their inevitable conclusions. 

In spite of the almost miraculous propagation of his 



MANNING AS A PROTESTANT. 103 

doctrines, or rather by reason of that very diffusion 
which provoked conflicts and gave rise to opposition, 
Newman had to show that Anghcanism did not possess 
the distinctive signs of the Church of God. Those fic- 
tions of an inspired witness of revelation, of an invio- 
lable depository of dogma, of a faithful administrator 
of the sacraments, of an episcopate in the direct line of 
the Apostolic succession — with what face were they to 
be maintained when all the facts belied them ? when 
the Anglican Church suffered and accepted the nomina- 
tion of a heretic — Hampden — as Regius professor of 
theology ? when it took active steps only to condemn 
baptismal regeneration, preached too strictly by Pusey, 
or the too Catholic system of interpretation of Tract No. 
90, or the impetuous Ward and his ideal Church ? when 
the episcopate gave over to the civil power the keys of 
the citadel, recovered energy only to fire on its own 
troops and to rage against the too zealous faithful ? 

From that time, and it is he himself who has said it, 
Newman is on his deathbed. For five years more he 
prolongs his agony; he stiffens against the call that is 
urging him to the feet of the Vicar of Jesus Christ. His 
old instincts, his education, sorrow at himself over- 
throwing the work of his life; the mortification of ap- 
parently justifjdng by a supreme act the odious calum- 
nies that accused him of Jesuitically masking his real 
design and of deliberately, with premeditation, doing 
the work of Catholicism ; the ties of family and of 
friendship, the fear of scandalizing faithful hearts and 
docile minds; the memory of the graces received in the 
communion of the Anglican Church; that filial piety 



104 purcell's "manning" refuted. 

which is not extinguished in a day, even when you 
have learned that the mother who carries you in her 
arms is not your true mother — all these feelings together 
were boiling in him, were torturing him, were holding 
him back. 

To justify this obstinate resistance in his own estima- 
tion, he took refuge in the most desperate, nay even 
the most sophistical, expedients. At one time he found 
some consolation in the mystical theory of the Babylon- 
ian Captivity. In his estimation the Anglican Church 
was sick, a slave to the civil power, a prey to error ; 
but the duty of those who were born in it was none 
the less to live and to die in its bosom, that is to say, 
in privation of the graces granted to more favored com- 
munions, but with the keen satisfaction of obedience 
until the end and of fidelity in spite of everything. 
This ingenious expedient ceased to satisfy him on the 
day when he made up his mind that, by this move- 
ment, he was but simply returning to Protestant indi- 
vidualism and to the suppression of the Church as a 
means of grace. In reality his decision was taken when 
he clearly perceived that he was held back, less by the 
scruples of his conscience, the doubts of his reason or 
the affections of his heart, than by the apprehensions of 
the head of a party, the weariness of the humiliated 
teacher, the point of honor of the general compelled to 
pass over to the enemy. 

One after another had he untied the bonds that held 
him to the past. He ceased to reside at Oriel College; 
he resigned his charge of the University parish of St. 
Mary's; by order of his bishop he had interrupted the 



MANNING AS A PEOTESTANT. 105 

series of the "Tracts for the Times" ; he gave up the 
editing of his review, the British Critic. In fine, he re- 
tired to Littlemore, a hamlet near Oxford, into a sort 
of hermitage or modest convent which he had built 
and where, surrounded by a cohort of young disciples, 
he led for two or three years a cloistered and monkish 
life. 

Events came hurriedl3\ Bunsen, the Prussian am- 
bassador, gave, without knowing it, the last impulse to 
a slow^ly formed resolve, by obtaining the assent of the 
Government and of the Church of England to his 
favorite j^roject of the creation of a mixed bishopric, 
half Anglican half Prussian, at Jerusalem. It was the 
patent, avowed cooperation, almost fusion with Conti- 
nental Protestantism. In the autumn of 1845 the long 
agony came to its end. On October 8, Newman went 
to abjure Protestantism, to have himself received into 
the Catholic Church and to take communion from the 
hands of an Italian Passionist Father, then on a visit to 
England, from a former shepherd of 'the Koman Cam- 
pagna. Father Dominick. 

III. 

I have had to follow^ the Oxford movement down to 
the final catastrophe. The mere fact that I could give 
an account of it without naming Manning even once 
clearly proves that, though he deeply felt its influence, 
he did not play any considerable part in that phase of 
it. The truth is that Newman is Tractarianism all by 
himself. Neither Manning's temperament, nor the 
circumstances of his life at that time, predisposed him 



106 puecell's ''manning'^ refuted. 

to take a leading part in the Anglo-Catholic movement 
in its beginnings. He v/as always much less a man of 
retirement, a theorist, a theologian and an author, than 
a man of action and of authority. The diocese of 
Chichester, thoroughly rural, in which for eighteen 
years he exercised his parochial functions under four 
bishops, only one of whom felt any sympathy for the 
new ideas, was not Oxford. 

Nevertheless, Manning was not slow, through the 
intermediation of common friends, to come into rela- 
tion with Newman. The principles of the new school 
appealed to every side of his nature. Detached ere 
long from the Evangelical party, he enrolled himself in 
that of the Anglo-Catholics. The first sermon that he 
published was the official proclamation of this. In it 
he treated of the rule of faith; and its fundamental 
affirmations, its developments, and especially the notes 
with which he enriched it, bore the mark of the new 
doctrine and the trace of the fact that he had submitted 
the proofs of his work to Newman. The Evangelicals 
were moved. Their organ, the Record^ — a Protestant 
Univers minus the talent, — inflicted a severe reprimand 
on this new wolf in sheep's clothing. The bishop of 
Chester issued a diatribe against him. Manning had 
taken rank among the Tractarians. 

All his friendships bore him to that side. After 
Robert Wilberforce, perhaps the closest of his friends, 
who thought exactly as he did, and Henry Wilberforce, 
his brother-in-law, he had scarcely any close connec- 
tion but with Mr. Gladstone, then a young member of 
the House of Commons, the hope of uncompromising young 



MANNING AS A PROTESTANT. 107 

Toryism^ as Macaulay called him in an article on the 
great work that he had just published on the "Union 
of Church and State." On a journey to Rome, in 
1838, — the first of the innumerable visits that Manning 
made to the Eternal City, — he had the young states- 
man for his companion. Together they went to see 
Dr. Wiseman, who scarcely suspected that he had be- 
fore his eyes, in the person of this Anglican ecclesiastic, 
his successor on the as yet uncreated archiepiscopal 
throne of Westminster. Together they frequented the 
churches and heard a Father of the order of Friars 
Preachers whose sermon, popular and dogmatic at the 
same time, moved Mr. Gladstone to jealousy for 
Anglicanism. Together they were walking one fine 
Sunday on the Piazza de Fiore when the rector of Lav- 
ington, more strict on this point as an Anglican than 
he was later on as a cardinal of Holy Church, severely 
reproved Mr. Gladstone for the grave fault of having 
bought apples on the Sabbath day. 

On returning to his parish. Manning, in spite of the 
accession of a bishop far from prejudiced in his favor, 
received in 1840 — at the age of thirty-two — his promo- 
tion to the important post of Archdeacon of Chichester, 
one of the two lieutenants of the Ordinary in the direct- 
ing of his clerg}^ It was the moment when, in the 
Tractarian camp, Newman in spite of himself betrayed 
his inner struggle, and when a whole band of bold 
young men, with Ward at their head, noisily pro- 
claimed their contempt for the Reformation and their 
love for Catholicism. Manning had always been more 
Protestant than his Oxford ally. Never had it cost 



108 puecell's "manning" refuted. 

him anything, while professing the principles of the 
new school, to pay homage or do justice to those Re- 
formers of the sixteenth century whose name seemed to 
scorch the mouth of certain Tractarians and whom 
Ward unhesitatingly consigned to eternal flames. 

In reality, between Newman and Manning, even in 
that honeymoon of their relations, and again when later 
on Manning as a Catholic thought he ought to dedicate 
a book to Newman as the master to whom he owed 
more gratitude than to any other man, there never was 
full harmony or absolute sympathy. As long as they 
were both Protestants, Newman v/as by far the more 
Catholic of the two. I know a cumbrous as well as a 
simple way of explaining this mystery. It is the one 
naturally adopted by Mr. Purcell, ever on the lookout 
for whatever can belittle his hero. To him there can 
be no doubt but that Manning, a servant to fortune, an 
adorer of the rising sun, an enemy of lost causes (I am 
quoting my author), always took his stand on the side 
that he thought the stronger and howled with the wolves 
at Geneva as well as at Rome. This elegant solution of 
the problem presents, among other defects, that of leav- 
ing Newman's conduct without the slightest explana- 
tion, Newman taking the same direction as Manning, 
but for an opposite reason. The right key seems to me 
to be given by the contrast between these two natures. 

The one is the very type of the intellectualist, strug- 
gling with his own conceptions, I almost said with the 
phantoms of his mind, led, from scruple and from sub- 
tlety, to call into question what is attracting him, to be 
distrustful of his own postulates, to saw off the branch 



MANNING AS A PROTESTANT. 109 

on which he is seated. The other is, in the full force 
of the term, a man of action to whom ideas are not the 
stakes of an infinitely subtle and complicated game, but 
bases of operations, the foundations on which it is neces- 
sary to build. As the former will necessarily be inclined 
to turn his credo over and over again and to look at it 
in all its aspects, to seek for its weak points with un- 
easiness, to see especially the hollows and crevices of 
the ground on which he has taken his stand, so the 
second, from a need for certitude, from practical neces- 
sity, will be faithful to his premises and will go direct 
to their logical conclusions. His Protestantism will be, 
in its time, as robust as, later on, his Catholicism, and 
both in their succession will be equally sincere. 

It was indeed from conviction, and not from politics, 
that at this time Manning was infinitely more anti- 
Roman than most of his allies. He wrote to Pusey to 
thank him for a work, but especially for the passages in 
it that were most opposed to Rome. He added that his 
conscience was stung at the thought of that turning 
away of affection, of that sacrilegious transport of men's 
hearts, of the mere object of worship to the Virgin Mary. 
In his estimation, a letter from Dr. V/iseman that had 
recently appeared sufficed to condemn the whole Cath- 
olic system; his parallel between the feelings of a child 
for its mother and those of the faithful for the Virgin 
to him seemed ^ ' dreadful. ' ' He differed radically in 
his tone and in his language in regard to Catholicism, 
not only from the light-weights of the party, but from 
the grave doctors, from those who, like Pusey, were to 
remain Anglicans td the end. 



110 pukcell's ''manning" refuted. 

In 1844, to free his responsibility from what he con- 
sidered the lax casuistry of Tract No. 90, he accepted 
the task of preaching before the University, on Novem- 
ber 5, — that is to say, the anniversary of the Gun- 
powder Plot and of the landing of William of Orange 
in 1688, — a sermon in honor of this double Protestant 
jubilee. Some have sought to see a cowardly defection 
in this act. It was only the honest application of his 
principles. If Manning had not been able to call him- 
self and to feel himself a Protestant and to take part in 
the Protestant celebrations of his Church, he would not 
have remained a single day in a communion that is 
Protestant of right and in fact. Some of his friends 
had a strong grudge against him for this manifestation 
of it. Newman, to whom he went next day to pay a 
visit at Littlemore, is said to have slammed the door in 
his face, if we are to believe a rather suspicious legend, 
since their correspondence was never interrupted and 
since the rector of Lavington was one of the small num- 
ber of those to whom Father Dominick's neophyte 
communicated his final resolve. 

So much, moreover, was he held to be one of the 
champions of Anglo-Catholicism that adversaries made 
no difference between him and the extreme Catholic- 
izers. As some one announced Manning's journey to 
Eome to the bishop of London, Blomfield : ' ' To 
Rome?" remarked the prelate; ''I thought he had 
been there already since the publication of his sermon." 
These suspicions and the bickerings of the Evangelical 
party hardly shackled the archdeacon of Chichester's 
activity. His charges or annual instructions amply 



MANNING AS A PROTESTANT. Ill 

and authoritatively treated of all the great questions 
then under discussion. The ' ' Essay on the Unity of 
the Church," published in 1842 and dedicated to Mr. 
Gladstone, was at once put in the rank of the classics 
of Anglicanism. The bishop of Exeter, the famous 
Phillpost, said : ' ' We have three men on whom to 
count: in the State, Gladstone; at the bar, Hope (Sir 
Walter Scott's grandson-in-law, ere long a companion 
of Manning's in conversion V) in the Church, Manning;" 
and he added: ''There is no power in the world that 
can keep Manning from becoming a bishop. ' ' A great 
religious newspaper, the Christian Remembrancer, shared 
this opinion and declared that the young archdeacon 
was one of those men whom the Church needs in its 
highest dignities and who could not grow old in the 
honorable post that they occupy. At Littlemore, in 
Newman's surroundings, on the eve of his submission, 
they were equally convinced, as we know from the 
testimony of Father Lockhart, then still an Anglican, 
that Manning was designated for the episcopate. An 
adversary, the eminent leader of the liberal party and 
of Anglican rationalism, Frederick Denison Maurice, 
after a brief sojourn under the same roof, in 1843, ex- 
claimed that he did not know where, in his time, one 
could find a better and a wiser bishop. Some years 
later, after an important meeting, he wrote that there 
was in that room a man who could save the Church, if 
he wished, and that man was Planning. He himself, 
in his secret diary, acknowledged to himself that he 
had his foot on the last step of the ladder which he had 
so much desired. 



112 purcell's ''manning" refuted. 

And so, when the crisis broke out, when Newman, 
by his conversion, that inexpHcable event, according 
to Lord John Russell, inflicted, as Disraeli expressed 
it, a shock on England from which she is still tremb- 
ling, when from day to day, from week to week, people 
learned of the defection of Ward, of Dalgairns, of Oak- 
ley, of nearly all the aides-de-camp of the recluse of 
Littlemore, the eyes of all, friends and enemies alike, 
were instinctively turned towards Manning as well as 
towards Pusey. They seemed the appointed leaders of 
a new campaign in which there was question of passing 
from the offensive to the defensive, in which there no 
longer was need of brilliant and adventurous outpost 
soldiers, but of men of authority and of government. 
Manning was deeply affected. To Newman he had 
written a farewell letter in which, while assuring him 
that, if he knew words that could express his profound 
love for him, without sullying his conscienee, he would 
willingly use them, and, while deploring that they 
could no longer meet, in this life, at the foot of the 
same altar, he hoped they would see each other in the 
next world. 

He foresaw the gravity of the crisis. The day on 
which he had at Oxford assisted at the degradation of 
Ward by the University, he had turned towards Glad- 
stone, and had said to him in an undertone: 'Apxv oj^lvuv, 
that is the beginning of sorrows. He did not know 
how to prophesy so well. Whilst Gladstone, who had 
enough confidence in him to write that he was begin- 
ning to think that, on a subject of importance, he could 
not differ in opinion with him, wished that the clarion 



MANNING AS A PROTESTANT. 113 

would sound loud and clear, Manning was beginning to 
be a prey to cruel uncertainties. A mysterious, a 
providental destiny, for him as well as for Newman, 
would have it that the hour of doubt should coincide 
with that of triumph. If he had been able to keep 
until the end the serene and absolute faith that made 
him condemn Newman's conversion as a sin, and 
stupefy Gladstone by attributing the submissions to 
Rome to a want of truth common to all the deserters, 
he would have been happier and stronger. Two days 
after Newman's great treason^ he could still assert to an 
intimate friend that nothing in the world could shake 
his faith in Christ's presence in the Anglican Church 
and in the sacraments. 

To a man of action, at the very hour when he is 
called upon to defend the most sacred of causes, this 
certainty is indispensable. The anguish of losing it 
gradually was not spared him. He saw himself forced, 
on the one hand, to state the unsolvable contradictions 
between the theory of Anglo- Catholicism and the reali- 
ties of Anglicanism. On the other hand, the constant 
progress of his internal and spiritual life, of his ever 
more and more mystic piety, of his pastoral zeal, of his 
asceticism, of his holiness, created in him new needs to 
which the Anglican Church could offer only illusory 
and lying satisfactions, but which the Catholic Church 
was fully in a measure to satiate. From 1846 he noted 
in his diary that the Anglican Church, in his estima- 
tion, was sick organically and functionally; that, in the 
former relation, it was separated from the universal 
Church and from the Chair of Peter, subject without 
8 



114 purcell's "manning" refuted. 

appeal to the civil power, despoiled of the sacrament of 
penance and of the daily sacrifice of the Eucharist, de- 
prived of the minor orders and mutilated in its ritual; 
that, from the second point of view, it no longer had 
daily service, nor disciphne, nor unity in devotion or 
ritual, nor preparatory education for its clergy, nor 
sacerdotal life in its bishops and its priests, nor a hold 
on the popular conscience, nor faith in the mysteries of 
the invisible world. 

This formidable act of accusation Manning was going 
to repeat incessantly for five long years. He was going 
to reproach his own Church with being wanting in an- 
tiquity, system, intelligibility, order, force, unity. He 
was going to deplore those dogmas on paper only, that 
universally abandoned ritual, that clergy and those 
laymen profoundly divided. He was going to say in 
a melancholy tone that though he was not a Roman 
Catholic, yet he had ceased to be an Anglican. He was 
going to struggle against himself, incessantly taking up 
the examination of conscience, asking himself if he was 
not a butt for the tempter's artifices, if he ought not to 
be distrustful of himself, to consider that those who 
have remained until now in Anglicanism are more 
humble than those who have left it. At the same time, 
he is compelled to note that nothing in Rome repels 
him enough to keep him away, whilst nothing in Pro- 
testantism attracts him sufficiently to hold him back. 

He exclaimed, in July, 1846, that the principal thing 
was the attraction of Rome, which satisfied him com- 
pletely, reason, feeling, his whole nature, whilst tlie 
Anglican Church was only an almost, and yet it was 



MANNING AS A PROTESTANT. 115 

that almost only by reason of the supplements and 
additions that were brought to it. He writes these 
curious words, which are at the same time an implicit 
protest and the avowal of an irresistible seduction. 
The net was tightening its meshes arround him. A 
little later he felt as if a great light had shone in his 
eyes. His feeling in regard to Roman Catholicism was 
not of the intellectual order. He had intellectual diffi- 
culties, but the great moral difficulties were in the act 
of melting away. Something was rising in him and 
repeating to him that he would die a Catholic. Uneasy 
about his future, he asked himself how he should know 
where he would stand in two years ? Where did New- 
man stand two years ago? Might it not be that he 
would stand at the same point? Strange thoughts visited 
hinij according to his own expression. In his estima- 
tion, the theory of the Oxford school was in manifest 
contradiction with the West and with the East. Angli- 
canism implied, on the one hand, principles that justi- 
fied Protestantism and which Lutherans and Calvinists 
were justified in invoking against it, principles, on the 
other hand, which necessarily led to Catholicism. The 
whole Anglo- Catholic movement rested also on a con- 
tradiction — there was question of Catholicizing the 
Church, that is, as regards some of the faithful, of being 
a means of grace for the supreme means of grace, of 
bringing forth their mother, of making use of the indi- 
vidualist method of Protestantism in order to restore 
Catholicism. In fine, despite these attempts at renova- 
tion, the Anglican establishment, mutilated, devastated, 
ruined at the Reformation, remained incapable of offer- 



116 purcell's "manning" refuted. 

ing an asylum to the penitent and a refuge to the dis- 
ciples of Christ. 

His diary, his letters to Robert Wilberforce and to 
Mr. Gladstone, are filled with these sad avowals. Yet 
Manning, like Newman, whose intellectual tempera- 
ment he did not possess, more than him, perhaps, would 
have prolonged resistance to these doubts if he had to 
give battle only to them. He had a repugnance, an 
invincible terror, at the thought of leaving his Chnrch. 
To him it was the one thing in the world, he wrote, 
that most resembled death. \Vhat a picture of the 
condition of his soul in that letter to one of the confid- 
ants of his anguish : All the bonds of birth, of blood, 
of memory, of affection, of happiness, of interests, all 
the seductions that can act on a will, attached him to 
his present belief. To doubt of it was to call in ques- 
tion all that was dear to him. If he had to give it up, 
it would be to him like death. 

Fortunately there was going on in him, at the same 
time, an internal, positive operation, that bore fruit in 
his life and that was to give him the decisive impulse. 
The Oxford school had given him a new conception of 
the Church, perhaps the notion of unity; but it was 
faith in the Holy Ghost, in his own office, in his con- 
stant action — in the Church as the source of infallibil- 
ity, in souls as the cause of certitude — that was going 
to complete this work, to reunite the membra disjecta of 
this doctrine and to make of it a living religion. Noth- 
ing is more striking than to show to what extent Man- 
ning, whilst he was waging this internal struggle and 
whilst he still believed himself an Anglican, was already 



MANNING AS A PROTESTANT. 117 

a Catholic by instinct, at heart, in practice and in 
methods. He was so by his concej^tion of the sacra- 
ments, by his celebration of the Eucharistic sacrifice, 
by his practice of confession. 

Manning made his confession, sometimes to his as- 
sistant, Laprimaudaye, who preceded him into Cathoh- 
cism, sometimes to other ecclesiastics. He heard the 
confessions of the faithful and professed that the sacra- 
ment of penance, far from being a counsel of perfection, 
as Robert Wilberforce had one day loosely insinuated, 
was a commandment so much the more strictly binding 
as sin abounds the more. A curious letter from him 
explains to Mrs. Sidney Herbert, the wife of the eminent 
statesman, his particular friend, his views on the deli- 
cate subject of the limit of the priest's and the hus- 
band's rights in the matter of confession and of the 
directing of conscience. Manning, like all the Anglo- 
Catholics of the time, violated to some extent the rules 
of the Church by taking hold of these usages. Confes- 
sions were made somewhat erroneously and perversely, 
without much care as to the limits of the parish and 
the rights of the diocesan. The legend, a legend in 
which undeniable testimony forbids me to put faith, 
relates that Manning, after he had become a Catholic 
and an archbishop, kept to this sad disdain for order 
and gave up usurping the rights of other bishops in the 
matter of confession and direction only on urgent rep- 
resentations being made to him. 

All the same he had to some extent violated the wise 
practice of the Church, by preaching from the pulpit, 
in sermons addressed to all, precepts and instructions 



118 puecell's '^manning" refuted. 

of conduct that the authentic director is very careful to 
model on characteristics and temperaments, to regulate 
in proportion to strength and to distribute individually. 
Mr. Gladstone, who wittily entreated his friend to open 
the compartment of casuistry, with which Manning's 
mind as well as his own was supplied, in order to dis- 
cuss some delicate case of conscience, justly remon- 
strated with him that with the rules of life promulgated 
in one of his sermons a Member of Parliament, a Min- 
ister of State like him, would have nothing left for him 
to do but to give up his career. 

Manning, moreover, was no less strict towards him- 
self. He imposed upon himself, not only in Lent, but 
in every season, fixed hours for prayer, meditation, 
reading, and examination of conscience. He practised 
fasting, at least on Wednesday and Friday. He con- 
fined himself to reading the Bible kneeling, to reciting 
the Seven Penitential Psalms. He mortified himself 
by special acts of abstinence. From 1847 on, he gave 
uj), for example, the luxury of horses and carriages. 
These were the beginnings of that asceticism in which 
he was to go so far later on. It will be acknowledged 
that this manner of living is not according to the Pro- 
testant spirit. Involuntarily did Manning show it by 
the customary use of formulas and expressions of the 
purest Catholicism. Pie spoke of the altar, of sacrifice; 
he promised to his friends commemorations in sacro; 
he wrote his private and confidential letters sub sigillo 
confessionis. Mr. Purcell, who is pleased to note trifles, 
points out that in 1847 Manning, while making use of 
a vocabulary thoroughly impregnated with Catholicism, 



MANNING AS A PROTESTANT. 119 

was still ignorant of the quasi-technical terms of Cath- 
olic devotion and improperly designated the Sacred 
Heart and the Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. 
This trait simply proves to what point all this internal 
development was spontaneous and personal. 

Despite his constant progress in this direction, Man- 
ning did not find calm and joy. He accused himself 
during those years, when he was called upon to play a 
part in evidence on the stage of the metropolis and of 
the Church, of worldliness and of ambition, of human 
views and of cowardly compromises. This so-called 
ambitious man was none the less troubled on that ac- 
count by the offer of the post of sub-chaplain to the 
Queen, which his brother-in-law, Samuel Wilberforce, 
had just vacated to become a bishop, and which was 
the first step in the ladder of dignities. He refused it, 
after having sounded his conscience to the bottom and 
examined his motives with a magnifying glass. He is 
indeed the same man who, learning of the promotion 
to the episcopate of a friend, who by that act betrayed 
the cause of truth such as he had professed it until 
then, and remained an Anglican by becoming a bishop, 
thanked God for having spared him the trial of this 
temptation. 

God, in effect, was leading him by other ways. A 
serious malady, which necessarily withdrew him from 
his occupations and placed him face to face with death 
and the eternal realities, in the spring of 1847, was to 
him a spiritua.1 renewal. He gave himself up to a 
minute moral inquiry, he weighed his m^otives, his 
actions, his thoughts, his prayers even, in the sanctuary 



120 purcell's '^ manning" refuted. 

scales, and he devoted himself more completely to God. 
His secret diary of that period is a long and mystic 
conversation of his soul with Christ. He has himself 
dated from that crisis, during which he had also the 
sorrow of losing his mother, his conversion, formerly 
sketched under the influence of the EvangeHcal Miss 
Be van. 

The remarkable feature of this evolution is that the 
renewal of faith and piety in Manning was closely as- 
sociated with his growing conviction of the truth of 
Catholicism. Why should we doubt that the appeal 
which he ever heard more pressing towards Rome came 
from Heaven itself, when he felt himself more and 
more in communion with Christ? He who detested 
controversy, who had pointed out to several souls that 
had entered on the same path as himself the danger of 
neglecting the elementary and sufficient means of grace, 
in his own Church, proudly seeking for a remote eccles- 
iastical idea, showed that, to his affected conscience, it 
was at the foot of the Chair of St. Peter and of the 
Vicar of Jesus Christ that the sources of eternal life 
sprang up. Henceforward, his Catholicism was no 
longer a temptation, it was a religion; it was no longer 
a theory, it was a reality; and the whole soul, no longer 
the reason or the mind alone, received its impress. 

On leaving that long retreat, during which it ap- 
peared to him that God was severing him from every- 
thing in order to possess Him entire and to be His only 
possession, his physicians sent him to the Continent. 
There he spent the summer of 1847 and the first six 
months of 1848, especially in Rome. That journey 



MANNING AS A PROTESTANT. 121 

was properly a course in ecclesiology and in practical 
Catholicism. Manning obeyed the principles of the 
Oxford school by haunting the CathoHc churches on 
the Continent. The Tractarians, faithful to the theory 
according to which Anglicanism was a branch of the 
universal Church, w^ould have deemed it equally cul- 
pable to frequent the Catholic chapels in England and 
not to frequent the edifices of that w^orship in France 
and Italy. Practice, however, hardly corresponded 
with this system. Newman, when he was converted, 
had never spoken a w^ord to but two Catholic priests. 
Oakle}^, having entered a Catholic chapel by chance, 
had fled precipitately in a panic of conscience. Manning 
did not entertain such scruples. He betook himself 
assiduously to all the offices, he chatted with all the 
ecclesiastics, he visited all the monasteries. The effect 
on him of the ceremonies of worship w^as to confirm 
him in his secret Catholicism. These symbolic acts, 
this objective religion, that grand drama of the expia- 
tion and of salvation incessantl}^ renewed and yet ever 
the same, all these things together seemed to him to 
bring out clearly the great realities of faith. In his 
estimation, Protestant w^orship w^as scarcely worthy of 
the name ; sometimes, as in the cathedral of Basel, 
through which he passed, it presented, not an austere 
simplicity, but the dryness and nudity of a cold ration- 
alism ; sometimes, as in the Anglican churches, it pre- 
sented to the faithful the body without the soul, the 
imitation of the forms without the vivifying dogma, of 
Catholicism. In St. Peter's, in the cathedral of Liege, 
in the basilica of Aix-la-Chapelle, in the Portluncula of 



122 purcell's "manning" refuted. 

Assisi, on the contrary, he felt himself at ease, at home, 
in close communion with the act and the priest. 

In Rome he fully breathed the air of the Catholic 
metropolis. So as to occupy his leisure, he took in 
the spectacle of the beginnings of Pius IX., and of a 
revolution. Pie conversed with the men of the various 
parties, with Father Ventura and other members of 
religious orders. The Sovereign Pontiff granted him 
two audiences, on April 9 and May 11, the day of his 
departure. His diary of the time, so copious on every- 
thing else, mentions this fact in two lines. Fortun- 
ately the Cardinal made good the omissions of the 
Anglican. Pius IX. , to whom, on behalf of his friend, 
Sidney Herbert, he presented a report on the famine in 
Ireland, spoke to him of Mrs. Fry, the prison reformer; 
in connection with this subject, of the Quakers; then, 
of the Anglican Church, of the observance of Sunday 
and of the saints' days ; of communion under both 
species. In fine, he praised the good works that were 
being done in England in such large numbers, adding 
this somewhat Pelagian expression : ' ^ When men do 
good works, God gives His grace;" and, turning his 
gaze towards heaven, he closed with these words: "My 
poor prayers are offered every day for England. ' ' Thus 
ended that memorable interview between two men 
destined to exert together so great an influence on the 
Church and on the age. 

Yet, scarcely had Manning returned to England when 
he plunged again into the thick of the fight. He found 
the Anglican world a' prey to a violent agitation. 
Hampden had just been raised to the episcopate, that 



MANNING AS A PROTESTANT. 123 

same Hampden whose appointment to the chair of the- 
ology at Oxford had formerly provoked a serious crisis. 
Manning had strongly declared himself in his letters 
against this choice. He surprised and scandaHzed 
some of his friends by the language of his Charge. In 
it he adopted the bias of having recourse to an expedi- 
ent purely formal, and refused, until a new order were 
issued, to see a heretic in a man whom the Church had 
not officially marked with this character. Mr. Purcell 
finds in this act, in effect difficult to explain, a fresh 
example of Manning's slippery diplomacy. It may 
indeed be that the indefinite prolonging of this impos- 
sible dualism between the Catholic convictions and the 
Anglican position of the Archdeacon of Chichester ex- 
erted a demoralizing influence on him. Perhaps we 
should see in it, however, only a scruple of legality and 
the natural repugnance of a man in whose estimation 
Anglicanism was altogether no longer hardly anything 
but a gigantic fiction, to make of an unfortunate prelate 
only the scape-goat of the general heresy. 

Nevertheless, this situation had its perils. Manning 
was in a certain sense cut in half. He was naturally 
exposed to contradicting himself. When troubled souls 
addressed him, as formerly they had done Newman, in 
order to bring them back to the Anglican fold, his em- 
barrassment was mortal. To confide his own doubts 
to them, to initiate them into his secret struggles, would 
have been to exceed his right and to violate his secret. 
Compelled to keep them provisionally in the Church to 
which he still belonged, he was induced to use argu- 
ments of which he was not sure, and, when he had sue- 



124 purcell's ^'manning" refuted. 

ceeded, it sometimes happened to him to have suc- 
ceeded too well and to have turned away forever, in 
spite of his ulterior efforts, a soul from the truth to 
which he was himself to submit later on. Sometimes, 
however, the truth gained the upper hand in spite of 
all prudence, as when he answered a young Anglican 
consulting him regarding the practical obligations of a 
thoroughly Catholic state of soul : '^The place for a 
man who believes all the dogmas of the Catholic Church 
is in the Catholic Church. ' ' 

Action, however, to a man like Manning, has in it- 
self such virtue, such seduction, such intoxication, 
that he sometimes forgot, in the heat of a public dis- 
course or of a particular conversation, not only, what 
was already a very serious matter, his own thoughts 
that he was holding in reserve, his own convictions, but, 
what was still worse, the spiritual realities on which 
they were founded. Another danger was, by reason of 
practising almosts of the ritual, of devotion, of asceti- 
cism, that of blunting his religious sensibility and of 
falling into that sort of clerical dilettantism that the 
Anglican ritual of our day has become. I say so with- 
out meaning to make the slighest attack on the serious- 
ness and the loyalty of men who courageously follow 
their conscience; it does not suffice to play at Catholic- 
ism in order to feel its effects. A clergy without voca- 
tion, a service without consecration, an authority with- 
out legitimacy, a religion without reality, all that is 
only the bark. The substance is elsewhere, and the 
soul risks becoming weary by coming in contact with 
these empty forms. 



MANNING AS A PROTESTANT. 125 

And so indeed a nature hungering after reality, 
action, truth, hke Manning's, could not be satisfied 
forever with the hollow viands of Anglo-Catholicism. 
He began to feel that the very truths which he pos- 
sessed, the half certitudes that retained him in Angli- 
canism, called for complementary truths, for the sup- 
plements of certitudes, and that, if he did not go to the 
end, he would lose even the little that he 4iad. Chris- 
tianity, in his estimation, implied Catholicism; to 
reject the latter systematically, would be to put him- 
self systematically outside of the former. In other 
words, to him, as formerly to Newman, the question of 
the salvation of his soul began to gain the upper hand 
over that of the consistency of his doctrine and the 
coherence of his convictions. The purely intellectual 
problem was effaced: the religious, moral, vital prob- 
lem presented itself more and more clearly. No longer 
would Manning have been able to give to others or to 
him-self to hold humbly to the certainties common to 
all denominations, to practise merely the virtues that 
are not more peculiar to Catholicism than to Protestant- 
ism, to confine oneself to asking for those elementary 
graces that are the common patrimony of all souls in 
good faith. No longer would he have been able to re- 
peat that it was not a question of life or death and that 
it was allowable for him to await a more precise voca- 
tion from on high. The internal work was completed. 
The cycle was run. External events were going to give 
the final impulse. 

If I have insisted so much on this psychological 
evolution, it is not merely because of the interest that 



126 furcell's "Mx^^nnixg" refuted. 

is offered by the history of a soul, and of such a soul; 
it is especially to answer Mr. Purcell's allegations and 
those of certain of his critics, who have seen or have 
wanted to see in this conversion, so tardy and so dis- 
puted, not the result of an unrelaxing struggle of six 
years, the slowly ripened fruit of an admirable develop- 
ment of piety, but only the entirely political act of a 
party man.* If the statement that I have just made is 
not the ample and sufl&cient refutation of this foolish 
calumny, if there does not come out of it the distorted, 
but the luminous and beneficent countenance of one of 
the masters of the spiritual life grappling with the 
dread problem of authority, I will have written in 
vain. Not that I dream of disputing the part played 
in Manning's final resolution by incidents like the 
famous judgment in the case of the Kev. George C. 
Gorham. All that I pretend is that, in regard to Man- 
ning as well as to Nev^^man, the final impulse caused 
only the determining of an act long since prepared by 
an entirely internal evolution. 

The Rev. G. C. Gorilian w^as an ecclesiastic whose 
ordination dated back to 1811, that is to say, to a period 
of disciplinary and doctrinal laxity. After having re- 
ceived institution for the first time, without the least 
difficulty, from the bishop of Exeter, he then saw him- 
self refused it by this same prelate, in consequence of 
an exchange of livings, because of his views on, or 
rather against, baptismal regeneration. Gorham ap- 
pealed from this refusal to the Court of Arches, the 
ecclesiastical tribunal of the province of Canterbury. 
Beaten in this instance, he carried his appeal before the 



MANNING AS A PROTESTANT. 127 

judiciary committee of the Privy Council, that is, be- 
fore the last resort of English justice. It was a purely 
lay tribunal in law, since it was the Queen in her capac- 
ity of head of the State, and, consequently, according 
to the Protestant theory of the summus episcopus, of head 
of the Church, who there dispensed justice. The pres- 
ence of three prelates as assessors, and purely by con- 
sultative title, in no respect changed the affair, so much 
the more as they were in the minority against the lay- 
men. This court pronounced in favor of making pro- 
vision for the Rev. G. C. Gorham. Two facts stood out 
clearly from this judgment with invincible evidence. 

One is the royal supremacy. It was well known. 
Since the time of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth it was at 
the bottom of the English Reformation and of the An- 
glican establishment. Ordinarily, however, it was dis- 
creetly veiled. The whole Anglo-Catholic reaction had 
tacitly ignored it. People spoke of the Universal Church, 
of the councils, of the rule of faith; they systematically 
forgot that all these fine things were purely theoretical, 
and that in fact what was believed, what was professed, 
what ought to be believed and professed by the Church 
of England was what had been wished by Henry VIII. , 
what had been instituted by Elizabeth, what was main- 
tained by Victoria. The judgment of the Privy Council 
was a recall to the realit}^ 

In the second place, this usurpation by the State, 
which had become the supreme judge of doctrine, did 
not remain a mere juridical fiction. It was exercised 
this time against the episcopal authority and in favor 
of a definite heresy. Not only was the Church severely 



128 puecell's ''manning" eefuted. 

warned that it was not its own mistress, or the mistress 
of its faith and of its disciphne, but the true master 
declared that all that had been said, written, preached, 
for the past seventeen years, all Anglo-Catholicism, was 
a lie. It was allowable for an Anglican minister — ^for 
a priest, as the Tractarians said — to deny a sacrament, 
to teach and to practise Calvinism, nay even pure 
Zwinglianism. 

It was too much for minds thoroughly penetrated 
with neo-Catholicism. There was great emotion. There 
was no longer question of knowing, as in 1845, whether 
the premises laid down by Newman permitted the re- 
fusal of obedience to the seat of unity, Rome. There 
was question of knowing whether, for one's salvation, 
one could remain in a Church that had become a purely 
human institution; whose faith, symbols, sacraments, 
discipline, recruiting, were at the mercy of the lay tri- 
bunals sitting in the name of the civil sovereignty. 
Mr. Gladstone, lying ill, sat up in bed to say to Man- 
ning that the Church of England was lost, unless it 
saved itself by some act of courage. At the last mo- 
ment, the statesman receded before his own temerity. 
He refused, and he the thirteenth, at a meeting held at 
his house, to attach his name — because of his oath as a 
Privy Councillor — to the protest drawn up by Manning 
and signed by twelve faithful men and priests, among 
whom were Manning, Archdeacon Robert Wilberforce, 
Pusey, Mill, Professor of Hebrew at Cambridge, Henry 
Wilberforce, Keble and Hope Scott. 

On March 19, 1850, in the library of Chichester 
cathedral, Manning presided at a meeting of the clergy 



MANNING AS A PROTESTANT. 129 

of his archdeaconry which adopted a shorter formula 
of protest, but one no less clear. He drew up a declara- 
tion against the royal supremacy and had it signed by 
eighteen hundred members of the clergy. Then, before 
adopting the final resolutions, perhaps with the expec- 
tation, against all probability, of a favorable solution at 
the eleventh hour, he shut himself up in retreat. It 
was, five years later, his Littlemore, the agony of his 
Anglicanism. It lasted nine months, from March to 
December, 1850. As he wrote about it to Robert 
Wilberforce, every morning, on opening his eyes, his 
heart was almost breaking. He felt himself divided 
between truth and affection. Anglicanism, in his 
estimation, was no longer but a ruin. Sometimes he 
clearly discerned the port to which he was going: 
Rome, the centre of the one, holy, visible, infallible 
Church. On other occasions, vague visions floated be- 
fore his eyes. If he remained an Anghcan, he wound 
end in being a mere mystic. God, he thought, is a 
spirit, has no visible kingdom. Church or sacraments. 
Nothing, in any case, would make him return to the 
Anglican or any other form of Protestantism. 

He conversed open-heartedlj^ with Robert Wilber- 
force, who was passing through the same crisis. In 
regard to the public, of those even of his friends who, 
like Gladstone, could not conceive the sacrilegious idea 
of leaving the national Church, he believed he could 
remain silent as long as his party had not taken the 
irrevocable step. Perhaps he still vaguely hoped 
against all hope that the archbishops, in their quality 
of spiritual heads, of patriarchs of Anglicanism, would 



130 puecell's ''manning" refuted. 

intervene to restore purity of faith. He had to give up 
this unaffected illusion when he saw the Archbishop of 
Canterbury, Sumner, refusing to receive a delegation, 
abstaining along with the entire episcopate, except four 
of its members, from the debate on the Bishop of 
London's bill transferring to the episcopal body the 
ecclesiastical jurisdiction in last resort of the Privy 
Council, and declaring that he would never lend himself 
to disputing the sentence of a regular tribunal and that 
he saw nothing unlawful in the admission to the care 
of souls of an ecclesiastic hostile to baptismal regenera- 
tion. This attitude was not altogether that of the 
Apostles proudly declaring to the Sanhedrin that it was 
better to obey God than men. Thus the Church was 
not merely reduced to slavery. It was so with the ex- 
press consent of its heads, who were betraying it. It 
could no longer have but the name of Church. The 
reality had disappeared. 

All Manning's friends, his brother-in-law, Samuel 
Wilberforce, the bishop of Oxford, whose two brothers 
were passing through the same crisis, Gladstone, Pusey, 
his relatives, his elder brother, w^ho addressed letters of 
reproval to him and who always refused to see him 
again after his conversion, clearly felt that it was all 
over with him, that the rector of Lavington's submis- 
sion to Rome was no longer but a matter of weeks, 
almost of days. Mr. Purcell, forgetting the documents 
that he himself has published, again seeks to convict 
him of duplicity. ]\Ianning, no doubt, was fulfilling 
the strict obligations of his charge, but his heart was at 
Rome. On November 17 he saw himself obliged to 



MANNING AS A PROTESTAlfT. 131 

convoke according to order and to preside over a meet- 
ing of the clergy of his archdeaconry in order to protest 
against the Papal bull that had just restored, to the 
great wrath of official Anglicanism and of popular 
Protestantism, the Catholic hierarchy suppressed in 
England since the accession of Elizabeth. The position 
was an extraordinarily false one: he felt it, and he seized 
that opportunity to acquaint his brethren in the minis- 
try of the condition of his mind and of his formal re^ 
solve to abandon the Church of England. 

The hour of final hesitations, of last combats, had 
passed. Manning had given nothing to haste or to 
passion. He had struggled as long as he had dared, 
longer perhaps than a less scrupulous soul would have 
done, against the voice of his conscience. Gradually 
had he untied all the bonds which attached him to that 
Church he had tenderly loved and faithfully served. 
That time of retreat he had spent in reading the Brev- 
iary, the initiation into those spiritual beauties of the 
liturgy that had calmed and purified his soul. For the 
last time he went and knelt by Mr. Gladstone's side, in 
an Anglican church, in that little chapel of Bucking- 
ham Palace Road, in which preached an Anglican min- 
ister destined to become a Father of the Society of 
Jesus, and, rising when the communion service began, 
he said to his saddened companion that he could not 
again communicate in the Church of England. 

On April 6, 1851, the fifth Sunday of Lent or Passion 
Sunday, Manning and his friend Hope Scott, who had 
promised to walk hand in hand, made their abjuration, 
their confession, their profession of faith, and received 



132 purcell's '^manning" refuted. 

conditional baptism and absolution at the hands of 
Rev. Father Brownbill in the Hill street church. The 
doubts that had tortured him until the opening of 
Father Brownbill' s door disappeared as if by magic. 
A week later, on Palm Sunday, Cardinal Wiseman in 
person confirmed them and gave communion to them 
in his private chapel. 

It was the end of a life. Manning believed that it 
was even the end of his life, or at least of all public 
activity for him. He had indeed, without the slightest 
hesitation, resolved to get himself ordained as a priest; 
but there his views stopped; he thought of living and 
dying, in a tranquil and sweet obscurity, in the shadow 
of the sanctuary. He had at last, after so many storms, 
found peace, as is attested by this letter : ^ ' I feel that 
I have no other desire to form than to persevere in what 
God has given me for the love of His Son. What a 
blessed outcome ! As the soul said to Dante : E de 
martirio venni a questa pace!^^ The Times having ex- 
pressed its belief in 1852 that it could announce his 
return to Anglicanism, he wrote to it that he had found 
in the Catholic Church all that he sought, nay more 
than he would have been capable of conceiving, as long 
as he was not in its bosom. 

Manning was not one of those who turn back, or one 
of those who, having once known and embraced the 
truth, sleep in cowardly and egoist leisure. 



PART THIRD. 

MANNING AS A CATHOLIC. 
(1851-1892.) 

I. 

At the age of forty -three, after eighteen years in 
the ministry and eleven in the dignities of the Angli- 
can Church, Manning again found himself alone, 
non-commissioned, despoiled, without office, without 
friends, almost without relations. In these painful 
experiences he thought he saw a warning from God 
against human attachnients : he put himself on his 
guard against exclusive affections. Certainly it was 
not because the sources of love were dried up in that 
soul, in which we will see them later on playing rather 
abundantly until the evening of his life. Detached 
from purely human and terrestrial affections, he had 
not yet found in the practice of heroic or supernatural 
charity the use ol his power to love. What dominated 
in him, however, was joy, a celestial joy, the cheerful- 
ness of a soul inundated by the waves of grace, that at 
last has no obstacles. 

His priestly vocation had not experienced the shadow 
of a hesitation. Less than six weeks after his abjura- 
tion, on Saturday, the vigil of the feast of the Holy 

(133) 



134 purcell's ''manning" refuted. 

Trinity, Cardinal Wiseman ordained him with his own 
hands in his private chapel, and the second day after, 
on Monday, June 16, Manning, whom Father Faber, of 
the Oratory, had rapidly initiated into that ceremonial 
which, according to certain far frorn kindly judges, he 
never knew thoroughly, celebrated his first Mass in the 
church of the Jesuits and had Father de Ravignan as 
assistant at it. Though he already entertained views 
about him, the cardinal consented to let him go to 
study in Rome. There Pius IX. received him with 
these words coming from the heart: Vi benedico con tutto 
il mio cuore in tuo egressu et in tuo ingressu^ treated him 
as a son, wanted to converse familiarly with him once 
a month, and placed him in the Accademia dei Nobili 
Ecdesiastici. 

That sojourn in Rome, though there was something 
mortifjdng in a man of his age returning to school, 
going back, as he said, to the nursing-botde and the 
leading-strings of the seminarian, like St. Ignatius before 
him, left a luminous trace in his life. Besides his 
studies and the privilege of his relations with the Pope, 
he formed close association there with the chief person- 
ages of the Curia, with the Gesit, with Father General 
Beckx, with the great theologian Perrone, and with 
Father Passaglia, w^ho read the ''Summa" of St. 
Thomas Aquinas along with him. At the end of three 
years Pius IX., who would have liked to keep him 
near himself, had to send him back in answer to Wise- 
man's reiterated entl'eaties. 

The Cardinal Archbishop, in calling him to his as- 
sistance, was complying with a very just view of the 



MANNING AS A CATHOLIC. 135 

necessities of the situation. English Catholicism was 
passing through a great crisis. For over two centuries 
the object of a bloody, a most annoying persecution, in 
the person of its priests, heroic rebels against the relig- 
ion of Henry VIII. and Ehzabeth, or of its laymen, 
handed over, as victims of the Popish Plot, to the 
monstrous lies of a Titus Oates, it had furnished innum- 
erable martyrs to Protestant intolerance. It had not 
merely endured those sufferings that bring with them 
their compensation for exalted souls. Stricken with 
civil and political disabilities, it had experienced what 
is most cruel in persecution, namely, that shrinking, 
that narrow-mindedness which persecution in the long 
run brings about in the mind and heart of its victims. 
The revocation of the Edict of Nantes or the revolu- 
tionary Terror gathers in the flower of a nation; it casts 
it out or it shuts it up within, in a sort of home exile, 
and of this choice set it makes a coterie infected witli 
the spirit of refuge or of emigration. 

English Catholicism did not escape this law. Its 
priests were the chaplains of a few great families. The 
laity were disorganized, like the French Legitimists, in 
a sort of home emigration. There were no middle 
classes. The people comprised scarcely any but Irish 
immigrants. In London the aristocracy frequented the 
chapels of the Catholic legations and embassies; the 
poorer quarters had only humble and mean mission 
halls. 

Elsewhere it was still worse. In Liverpool, four 
chapels and fourteen priests for over a hundred thou- 
sand of the faithful. Four great events, which in a 



136 purcell's ''manning" refuted. 

certain sense marked the steps of a long evolution, 
came to change the face of things. 

The French Revolution, by suppressing the colleges 
of Douay and St. Omer's, brought the younger clergy 
back to their natal soil in order to prepare them there 
for the priesthood, while at the same time the highly 
dignified example of the exiled French priests and the 
thoroughly new feeling of the solidarity of the Churches 
and of the aristocracies against the powers of destruc- 
tion were weakening the Protestant and insular preju- 
dice. The emancipation of the Irish Cathohcs in 1829, 
the breezy invasion of O'Connell and his barbarians^ 
that is, of the democracy and of its methods, into the 
peaceful fold in which the little flock had browsed until 
then, without going outside, on rather unsavory grass, 
inaugurated a new era. There was an Enghsh Catho- 
licism to which the disdainful tolerance accorded to an 
inoffensive minority no longer sufficed; it was con- 
scious of the grandeur and of the strength of its princi- 
ple; it carried the war into the camp of official Angli- 
canism or of militant Protestantism. Wiseman was its 
leader and its champion. At the same time the Oxford 
movement, by restoring Catholicism to a place of honor 
in the Anglican Church and by throwing Newman, 
Faber, AVard, Oakley, Dalgairns, Coffin, Manning and 
so many others into the Catholic Church, w^as trans- 
forming the moral atmosphere. A soil stricken w^ith 
sterility for three centuries past was bearing new har- 
vests, a dried stem was beginning to bloom again. 
Having become a conqueror once more, the Church 
raised her head. The new comers, excited by the 



MANNING AS A CATHOLIC. 137 

struggle, had not let their courage become debased into 
cowardly idleness. No exotic blemish, no refugee tone 
marked their conduct. They did not believe that the 
conquest of truth, at the price of the most painful sacri- 
fices, should exclude them from the arena of noble 
combats. 

Henceforward, in English Catholicism there were two 
categories, two classes, two parties: the timid and the 
valiant, the mute and the eloquent, the passive and the 
active, the old and the new Catholics. If the division 
was not always brought about in accordance with the 
beginnings, if there were Catholics of the old stock 
among the ardent and the converts, — one especially, 
the greatest of all, — among the moderates this classifi- 
cation was none the less correct on the whole. It was 
natural that the former Protestants should in their new 
Church be taken with all that had been wanting to 
them in the old, present and visible authority, living 
infallibility, ready and gladsome obedience. If all did 
not go so far as Ward, who would have wished to re- 
ceive every morning, along with his newspaper, at his 
breakfast hour, a Papal encyclical containing dogmatic 
definitions, they were all at least by vocation what it 
has been agreed to call Ultramontanes. A conflict 
with the semi-Gallicanism and the timid reserve of the 
Catholics by birth was inevitable. 

Pius IX. hastened it by restoring the ecclesiastical 
hierarchy and by substituting for the apostolic vicari- 
ates an archbishopric and twelve bishoprics. By pro- 
claiming England ripe for return to the normal organism 
of ecclesiastical life, the Apostolic Letter, "Universalis 



138 purcell's ''manning" refuted. 

Ecclesise," repudiated at the same time the chimerical 
hope of seeing the AngHcan Church as a body, with its 
clergy and its prelates at its head, submitting to the 
Vicar of Jesus Christ. This act provoked an explosion 
of Protestant fanaticism in which Lord John Russell 
thought he ought to take part by having a law passed 
ab irato, destined to be tacitly abrogated even before it 
had been applied, prohibiting Catholic bishops from 
using territorial titles. In the bosom of the Church 
herself the offensive movement of propaganda and of 
conquest received a strong impulse from it. In the 
person of Wiseman, created a cardinal and appointed 
archbishop, the Holy See had a devoted lieutenant. 
Unfortunately, the episcopate counted too many mem- 
bers filled with the old spirit for perfect unity to be 
able to reign among the commanders. 

The ten years that elapsed between Manning's return 
to London and his succession to the archiepiscopal 
throne were all filled up with sad struggles between the 
two opposing principles, still further complicated with 
deplorable questions of persons. Manning was neces- 
sarily mixed up in them by the nature of his opinions, 
by his temperament, and especially by the confidence 
of his archbishop. 

From the beginning, out of obedience, he was des- 
tined to stir up many hostilities by founding a com- 
munity of Oblates. 

Cardinal Wiseman complained of not finding, in the 
numerical insufiiciency of his clergy, the concurrence 
that he would have wished for from the regulars of his 
diocese. The quarrel between the diocesan authorities 



MANNING AS A CATHOLIC. 139 

ana the orders dated far back in England : had not 
Saint-Cyran, under the name of Petrus AureHus, already 
to interfere in it ? Manning' s ideal, as was proved by 
his founding the congregation of the diocesan mission- 
ary priests of the Oblates of St. Charles, was not that 
of the Orders, entirely turned towards the perfection of 
the internal and contemplative life — even with the broad 
concessions made to practical life, and from outside, by 
the Institute of Ignatius of Loyola — it was that of the 
communities of secular priests living under a rule and 
in society, but with the view of serving as a reserve 
and, if we may dare say so, of central brigades under the 
head of the diocese. 

It was to this creation that he applied himself with- 
out delay. Wiseman, who had successfully made use 
of him, during the Crimean war, in negotiating with the 
Government for the founding of a Catholic chaplaincy 
in the army, independent of the Anglican chaplain- 
general, could not yet place him at the head of a par- 
ish. He entrusted him with the creating of this con- 
gregation of auxiliaries, the need of which was so much 
the more pressing as it would be in vain, as he wrote, 
not without bitterness, to Father Faber, superior of the 
London Oratory, to appeal to the existing orders. 
Manning went to study at San Sepulcro, near Milan, 
the model institute of St. Charles Borromeo, and to sub- 
mit to Eome the plan that he had drawn up. Cardinal 
Barnabo, head of the Congregation of the Propaganda, 
to which the affairs of England belonged, approved of 
it. The Pope sanctioned its statutes, with a special 
blessing, on January 21, 1857. 



140 purcell's ''manning" refuted. 

Three chief points constituted the essence of this 
rule : strict submission of the community to the head 
of the diocese ; amount of spiritual exercises and of 
theological studies fixed and calculated with a view to 
maintain at a certain level the spirit of the institution; 
in fine, the absolutely secular character of the society, 
combined with the clergy of the diocese, and co-operat- 
ing in its works. Manning strove to bring out the im- 
mense riches of Catholicism by reason of this creation. 
He knew religious life in the cloister, the practice of 
the counsels of evangelical perfection, with its infinite 
shades, from pure contemplation and adoration to the 
manual and intellectual labor of the Benedictines and 
to the almost absolute suppression of the choir ofiices 
and the strict subordination of the exercises of worship 
to external activity as in the Society of Jesus. He is 
in possession of those communities of priests interme- 
diary between the atomic isolation of the secular clergy 
and the fixed grouping of the orders, those congrega- 
tions without vows. He at last lays in the secular 
clergy, in the simple priest, that corner-stone of the 
whole edifice, of the most marvelous instrument of 
propaganda, of moral influence and of hierarchical obe- 
dience. What strength in this infinite variety 1 What 
knowledge of the spiritual keyboard and of its innu- 
merable touches! And how one understands that Pro- 
testantism, even when most faithful to the spirit of the 
Reformation, sometimes tends to borrowing or to imi- 
tating these precious means of action. 

On Pentecost Sunday, 1857, Manning was able to 
inaugurate his Institute. Five priests and two clerics 



MANNING AS A CATHOLIC. 141 

— that was his whole force — were installed at Bayswater. 
Next day, at five o'clock in the morning, they went to 
celebrate their Mass in a neighboring church still in 
course of erection. Two thousand Catholics settled in 
the neighborhood, the church unfinished in which Mass 
was said on Sunday and once a Vv^eek, a school T\dth 
forty poor children — such were the beginnings of this 
work. For eight years Manning directed his congrega- 
tion of the Oblates of St. Charles. He met with cruel 
trials there, there he waged fierce combats, there he 
endured severe defeats; none the less did he write of 
them in 1875 : "The eight years at St. Mary's have 
been the happiest of my life. " His name had remained 
inscribed on the door of the little room into which the 
Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster loved sometimes 
to retire in order to taste there anew the delights of 
peace. 

Peace! it was not peace, however, that marked this 
phase of his life. Side by side with the indefatigable 
activity that he displayed there, he had to wage com- 
bats without truce or let-up. His dear congregation of 
the Oblates of St. Charles was itself worth violent at- 
tacks to him. In the absence of regular seminaries, 
Cardinal Wiseman had thought he was doing well by 
confiding to him the direction of St. Edmund's College, 
in which the clergy of Westminster and those of South- 
wark were trained. He had reckoned without the head 
of this diocese, Rt. Rev. Dr. Grant, formerly his inti- 
mate friend, who had become his obstinate adversary. 
This prelate drew from the Westminster chapter a pro- 
test as vehement as his own, carried the matter to the 



142 purcell's ''manning" refuted. 

court of Rome, and there won his case on account of 
some technicahty. It was necessary to bow before this 
decree. 

The interference of the Westminster chapter was the 
first symptom of an opposition that was to give way 
only after a long struggle. For the moment Manning 
bore the penalty of the early favors of Pius IX. When, 
on April 8, 1857, six years to the day after his abjura- 
tion, he was appointed provost (or dean) of the chapter 
of Westminster, this rapid promotion, which he as little 
expected as did his new colleagues, carried their irrita- 
tion to its height. 

Thus raised to a rank already rather elevated in the 
hierarchy, Manning, who saw in Wiseman the immedi- 
ate representative of the Holy See, and who was con- 
gratulating himself on being identified, like most of the 
new converts, with this Cardinal's Ultramontane doc- 
trines, was going to have to struggle against passionate 
enmities. Convinced that this opposition was animated 
by an anti-Roman and anti-PapoI spirit and that there 
would be no salvation for English Catholicism but when 
the present generation of bishops infected with Gallicanism 
had passed away, he was the Cardinal's right-hand man 
in the painful struggles that occupy the closing years 
of his episcopate. Wiseman had not many faithful 
assistants in his immediate surroundings. There is 
nothing more pathetic than the isolation of the closing 
days of this great servant of the Church. His most 
intimate companion, he to whom, in the gradual 
weakening of his health and his inexperience of busi- 
ness, he entrusted the care of his practical interests. 



MANNING AS A CATHOLIC. 143 

Mgr. Seaiie, was a man without much delicacy, devoid 
of true affection, entirely devoted to the party of the 
old Catholics. This regrettable situation was partly 
the cause of the capital mistake that was to poison the 
end of that life. 

The Cardinal Archbishop let himself be persuaded 
that he needed a coadjutor, and allowed his hand to be 
forced in the choice of this assistant so much the more 
important as he was to be invested with the right of 
succession. It was the Rt. Rev. Dr. Errington, bishop 
of Plymouth from 1851 to 1856, on this occasion 
created titular archbishop of Trebizond. Scarcely had 
the union been contracted when an absolute incompati- 
bility of temperament was revealed between Cardinal 
Wiseman, ardent, bold, friendly to generous initiatives, 
the patron of the new Catholics and of their conquer- 
ing zeal of neophytes, and Dr. Errington, the scion of 
an old race as proud of the purity of its blazonry as of 
that of its faith. Daily contact, — they were lodged to- 
gether, — and the irritations of party spirit, were not 
slow in making this primitive want of sympathy degen- 
erate into violent antipathy. 

The tragic feature of this situation was that they saw 
no way out of it. Was Wiseman, as he was growing 
old, going to let authority gradually slip into the hands 
of Searle and Errington ? If at that hour he had not a 
confidant, an energetic counsellor, he w^ould have con- 
tinued to groan over the evil without doing anything to 
remedy it. In this crisis, Manning was the Cardinal's 
support, his mainstay, perhaps his inspirer. 

In his estimation there was question of a great and 



144 pukcell's '^ manning" refuted. 

decisive battle between error and truth, between con- 
sistent, logical Catholicism, faithful to its principles, 
and a bastard, emasculated Catholicism, adapted to the 
world and to the age. To a man like him, it was a 
sacred duty to give the strongest kind of helping hand 
to the cause of the Holy See, of unalloyed religion, 
compromised by the weakening of a prelate's health. 
There was going to be a future for the Church in Eng- 
land. There was question of knowing whether Wise- 
man's successor would continue or would destroy his 
work, whether he would appeal to the new forces or 
would return to the anti-Roman, anti-Paj^al, anti- 
Catholic Catholicism of old. As 'procurator or personal 
agent to the Cardinal, Manning negotiated for him at 
the court of Rome. He kept up a constant correspond- 
ence v/ith the secret participating chamberlain to Pius 
IX., Mgr. George Talbot, who had the Pope's ear, whom 
a similarity of destiny and of convictions had bound to 
Manning, and who served as intermediary between the 
Sovereign Pontiff and those of his friends in England 
who wished to dispense with the official red tape of the 
Propaganda. 

If Manning used this channel more freely than any- 
one else, Wiseman, who had appointed him his pro- 
curator with power to act, had only to congratulate 
himself on his zeal. Whilst the Cardinal, with the aid 
of fine petitions drawn up in good style, was rather 
gently carrying out his coadjutor's recall, Manning was 
working at it from 1859. Made a prothonotary apos- 
tolic with the title of Monsignore in the following year, 
he was gaining a foothold in that very special circle 



MANNING AS A CATHOLIC. 145 

which aids the Pope in governing the Churcli. In 
England the crisis was becoming aggravated; nearly all 
the bishops declared in favor of Errington; the secon- 
dary clergy indulged in indecent discussions even in 
the Protestant and Liberal newspapers; the laity took 
sides in a body with the champion of hereditary Cath- 
olicism, of sanctimonious somnolence, of the dolce far 
niente. 

It was the moment of dangerous transactions. 
Wiseman, from weariness, gave way to it but too 
much. Relieved by a Pontifical act in 1861 of the 
assistance of a coadjutor who had become odious to 
him, he attached less importance to the question of his 
successorial rights on which everything turned, and 
which, in reahty and to Manning, was more important 
than any other. And so indeed it was the agent with 
power to act who eliminated these fatal compromises. 
To the gloomy prophecies of schism made by Cardinal 
Barnabo, prefect of the Propaganda, he answered with 
full confidence in the effect of an act of authority. 
Let Rome speak, he said, and everything will be well. 
He was calmly convinced, he wrote, that it was one of 
those caiLsse majores in which the Holy See is especially 
guided by our Lord specially present. Such certainty 
is not easily distinguishable from faith. It has its 
moral quality, it gives out its full and pure sound. 
And so indeed, in Manning, this Ultramontanism with 
which he was so much reproached, very far from be- 
longing to the domain of politics, even ecclesiastical, 
and of the contingent, was the very fruit of his piety, 
of his slowly elaborated convictions, of his religious 
10 



146 purcell's '^manning" refuted. 

experiences. The man who was able to write these 
lines, intended only for the eyes of a close confidential 
friend — "The truth, the truth that alone has saved me, 
is the infallibility of the Vicar of Jesus Christ, in so 
much as being the only and perfect form of the infalli- 
bility of the Church, and consequently of full faith, of 
full unity and of full obedience," — that man could be 
mistaken: he did not adopt these theories in order to 
flatter a Sovereign PontiS on whom his career de- 
pended. 

With him, one could not repeat too often, Ultra- 
montanism was only the last expression, the logical 
outcome of a development of internal life and of piety 
whose other fruits were an unfaiHng faith, an un- 
bounded charity, and a rigorous personal asceticism. 
Would it not be nesessary to complain of those whose 
eyes would be shut by party spirit to that entirely 
spiritual and religious origin of Manning's thoroughly 
Roman Catholicism, or who would refuse to see in his 
particular conception of Christianity the ever bubbling 
source of that broad love of humanity and of that bold 
view of the rights and of the duties of society with 
which the latter part of his career was inspired? 
Herein lies the very heart of our subject; let us, then, 
say so once more, no matter how paradoxical the asser- 
tion may seem, that Manning's Ultramontanism was a 
form of his piety, a step in his spiritual progress, and 
it was in it that he found the inspiration of his Chris- 
tian socialism, the motive of his popular activity, the 
spring and the regulator of his generous temerities of 
thought, of language and of conduct. It would be 



MANNING AS A CATHOLIC. 147 

absurd to force the note and to pretend to draw from 
this fact general conclusions, but it is a fact that Man- 
ning was an Ultramontane to the same extent that he 
was a great Christian, and that he was the apostle of 
reforming Catholicism and of social reform to the same 
extent that he was an Ultramontane. 

Therein is the unity of his life. It is also the mes- 
sage of hope and of consolation that he wished to leave 
to a generation weary of the negations of rationalism 
and frightened at the problems of poverty and of evil. 
To reconcile the two great opposing currents by making 
them flow in one and the same channel, one of which 
ended in the Vatican Council and in the proclamation 
of the dogma of infallibility, whilst the other, after 
having shaken or overthrown all the postulates of faith 
and all the principles of certitude, came to beat with 
its furious waves against the foundations of society 
itself; to make of the Pope, proclaimed and acknowl^ 
edged to be the incorruptible guardian of the deposit of 
Christian revelation, the head of a Church that had 
again become the refuge of the suffering and of the 
oppressed ; to show to the people, disabused of the fic» 
tions of doctrinaire Liberalism, crushed under the weight 
of the realities of economic Liberalism, the incompar^ 
able power of enfranchisement, of reparation and of 
regeneration of a whole religion of liberty and of aU' 
thority; in a word, to make of the gospel of Christ, 
interpreted and applied by His Vicar and by the suc- 
cessors of the Apostles, the charter of mankind ; to 
make the Church kneel before the Cross and the world 
before the Church, such was the plan that was gradu- 
ally formed in Manning's mind. 



148 puecell's ''manning" refuted. 

He was not to be mistaken, in kind, in the confidence 
that he had placed in the Holy See. Undoubtedly, in 
the course of that struggle of six years, Cardinal Wise- 
man and his procurator endured some defeats. I have 
already spoken of that affair of St. Edmund's College, 
in which it was necessary to leave the place. On an- 
other point, the application of a new law relative to the 
registering of ecclesiastical foundations, Wiseman, who 
wanted to shun the danger of putting again in force 
legislation against mortmain property, won his case 
against the majority of the episcopate. On the con- 
trary, he was worsted in the pretensions that he had 
raised as metropolitan over the inspection of diocesan 
colleges arid seminaries. 

All these differences did not fail to sour men's minds. 
Manning had to humiliate himself for a vehement scene 
that took place one day between him and Mgr. Scarle, 
not far from Wiseman's sick bed. The Cardinal, who 
was sometimes irritated by the systematic hostility of 
men very far below him in merit, talent, character and 
services, as well as in hierarchical rank, apologized, by 
order of the Propaganda, for some rather malicious wit- 
ticisms. In reality, Cardinal Barnabo, with that dip- 
lomatic obstinacy whose gentle resistance is almost 
invincible, favored Errington's cause. Fortunately the 
Propaganda at last refused to take part in an affair that 
was too delicate and too complicated. There was not 
question of issuing a judiciary decree, but of regulating 
an organic difference. And so, though the Holy Office 
had declared that there were no canonical reasons for 
deposing Dr. Errington from his jus successionis, Pius 



MANNING AS A CATHOFIC. 149 

IX. , whose patience was almost exhausted, called up 
the case, decided to strike what he himself called iin 
colpo di Stato di Dominedio and invited the Archbishop 
of Trebizond to give up his rights. Errington obeyed. 
He none the less kept a whole party that pretended 
that his renunciation was of no avail and that specu- 
lated on the early re-opening of the question of succes- 
sion to AViseman. There was only one way of warding 
off this danger, namely, the nominating of a new coad- 
jutator cum jure successionis. Manning adopted that 
course which would have had, among other results, 
that of shutting the door against the ambitions that 
some attributed to him, if he had any. He worked 
ardently to make the choice fall on the bishop of Bir- 
mingham, Dr. Ullathorne, who was far from being his 
friend. 

Fortunately, this combination ran up against an ob- 
stinate, invincible resistance : Wiseman had made trial 
of a coadjutor, he had enough of it ; on no considera- 
tion did he want to begin the adventure over again. 
It seemed that this long struggle was of little advan- 
tage to Manning. It had made for him irreconcilable 
enemies in the episcopate, in the clergy, among the 
laity, even in the outside Protestant and Liberal world. 
It was the time when he was serving his painful ap- 
prenticeship in unpopularity. It is true that, in com- 
pensation, he had acquired valuable friendships in 
Rome. Pius IX., in particular, had seen much of 
him, had learned to know him, to place dependence 
on him, to appreciate him. Mgr. George Talbot was 
entirely devoted to his correspondent. These very 



150 purcell's ^^ manning" refuted. 

natural sympathies were to become still warmer by 
reason of the great services that Manning rendered to 
the cause of the Papacy. 

With the same sincerity and the same passion as he 
defended the spiritual authority of the Holy See, he 
defended also its temporal authority. Napoleon III.'s 
mad policy had just made the question of the temporal 
power rise up in all its gravity. Italy had just been 
organized with the military and diplomatic aid of 
France. Founded in the name of that too famous prin- 
ciple of nationalities, set in honor by the head of the 
only State perhaps that had nothing to expect and 
everything to dread from it, the young subalpine king- 
dom stopped shuddering in the presence of the patri- 
mony of St. Peter only at the veto of the conqueror of 
Solferino, who had become the sentinel of the Vatican. 
Whilst these contradictions were equally irritating Ital- 
ians and partisans of legitimacy, valgar Liberalism 
allowed itself to reckon that the separation of the spirit- 
ual and the temporal required the subjection of the 
head of a universal Church to the head of a particular 
State. 

Manning entered the lists in two series of conferences 
which he collected into volumes, whose zeal people 
began by praising at the Propaganda and which, a little 
later on, came near being a bad business for him. 
What was disconcerting was the infinitely. more relig- 
ious than political spirit of this champion of the Holy 
See, who was protesting against all assimilation of the 
sacred rights of the Pope with the terrestrial and con- 
tingent principle of legitimacy, and who was almost 



MANNING A3 A CATHOLIC. 151 

condemning the use of material means and recourse to 
force in order to defend an entirely divine cause. 

Non tali auxilio nee defensorihus istis. 

The threat was made to put this rash work on the 
Index. Like Fenelon, he was quite ready to submit 
with a sort of bitter pleasure, happy, not at being put 
in the case of undergoing this judgment, but of having 
had the opportunity to give, in his time and in his 
country, an example of docility in a matter of opinion. 
This trial was spared to him. Some slight errors of 
form prevented neither the Civilta Cattolica from speak- 
ing favorably of his work, nor a new book by him on 
''The Glories of the Holy See at the Present Time," 
from meeting with a still warmer reception. 

It was at this moment that came Cardinal Wiseman's 
death, so long expected and discounted. Recalled 
from Rome by telegraph. Manning had the consolation 
of bidding him adieu before closing his eyes, on Feb- 
ruary 15, 1865. The crisis was so much the more 
serious as great uncertainty prevailed on this occasion. 
Wiseman, cured of the taste for coadjutors by a single 
experience, had obstinately refused until the end to 
receive a new one. There was a party in existence 
that upheld Dr. Errington's indefectible right, in spite 
of his giving it up. There was question of knowing 
who would win, an adherent of the factional stationary 
old Catholicism, frightened at its own shadow, or one 
of the ardent, active, aggressive young Catholicism. 
Everything depended on the choice that Rome would 
make. The AVestminster chapter had to present a list 



152 purcell's ^'manning" refuted. 

of three candidates, on whom the bishops were to draw 
up a confidential report.' It seemed certain that, if 
this body avoided oSending the Pope by submitting 
Errington's (the deposed coadjutor's) name to him, 
and if they were sufficiently well advised to inscribe on 
their list the name of the bishop of Birmingham, Ulla- 
thorne, the choice of this moderate, conciliatory prelate 
would make no difficulty. The chapter were fore- 
warned of the exclusion pronounced against Errington. 
They took no account of it, and capped the climax of 
their error by not finding a place for Dr. Ullathorne 
along side of the ex-coadjutor, and the bishops of Clif- 
ton, Dr. Chfford, and of Southwark, Dr. Grant. 

From that time the outcome of the crisis was becom- 
ing much more difficult to foresee. The English Gov- 
ernment, entirely heretical and schismatic as it was, 
thought it ought to interfere in favor of Grant, who was 
looked upon favorably by the Ministers since his diffi- 
culties with Wiseman. Dr. Clifford none the less held 
the string. If at Rome he was somewhat familiarly 
called un buon ragazzo, his birth, his connections, his 
temperament assured to him the devoted support of the 
entire old Catholicism and of the leaders of rank in the 
lay aristocracy. Cardinal Antonelli, a slave to State 
reason, thoroughly steeped in politics, scarcely touched 
by spiritual interests, was inclined to take great 
account of the recommendations of the semi-official 
British agent, Mr. Odo Russell; but the stamp of Lord 
Palmerston and of Lord John Russell could not suffice 
to make Dr. Grant's candidacy acceptable at the Vati- 
can, where he was referred to as that piccola testa e 



MANNING AS A CATHOLIC. 153 

pettlgola; of that prelate spoiled, according to Mgr. Tal- 
bot, by seventeen years' residence on the banks of the 
Tiber, which had given him the taste for intrigue and 
the duplicity of the Italian character without its noble 
fidelity to the Holy See. ) 

All that was deeply agitating the capital of Christen- 
dom in that spring of 1865. The cardinals of the Pro- 
paganda, with Barnabo at their head, hardly cared to 
assume responsibility for an ungrateful task. In 
reality, everything depended on the part that the Pope 
would take in calling up the affair or letting it take its 
course. An English member of a religious order, then 
present in Rome, Father Coffin, openly wished for 
what he wittily called, not a coup d^etat, but a colpo del 
Spirito Santo. Mgr. Talbot did not remain inactive. 
Though Manning had pushed respect for the oath of 
discretion that he had taken so far as to refuse to tele- 
graph to him the names of those chosen by the chapter, 
and though he had suspended his correspondence with 
him for three weeks and more, at the critical moment, 
from February 24 to March 18, the secret chamberlain 
was kept sufficiently well informed by the provost him- 
self, by Patterson, by Morris, to be in a position to 
balance with Pius IX. the influence of the agents of 
the Searles, the Erringtons, the Grants, the Cliffords 
and the Ullathornes. If he assumed a little too much 
prominence and attributed to himself more importance 
than he possessed, if even for an instant he was so un- 
affectedly delighted as to believe that the Holy Father 
had cast his eyes on him and to say so to his friend 
Manning, he none the less had his use in his rank and 
in his place. 



154 purcell's "manning" refuted. 

Faint rumors were beginniDg to designate Manning. 
He had to undergo those alternatives of hope and of 
doubt that are so cruel to the ambitious. One day, he 
wrote bad news: If he said that not once had this per- 
spective presented itself to his thought, he would be 
lying; but, while asserting that not. for an instant had 
he thought it probable, or reasonable, or conceivable, 
he told only the strict truth. God knew that not once 
had his praj^ers expressed to Him the shadow of such 
a wish. . . The work on which he was engaged did not 
depend on the favor or the approbation of any one 
whomsoever, except our Lord or His Vicar. . . If the 
Holy Father ever wished for the destruction of his 
work, it would cease to exist before the setting of the 
sun: otherwise, no one in the world could destroy 
it . . . He had offended Protestants, Anglicans, Galil- 
ean Catholics, national Catholics, worldly Catholics, 
and the Government, and that public opinion which, 
in England, all day long and by every means, combated 
the Church and the Holy See. His correspondent 
knew whether that was the way that leads to rewards 
here below; he hoped to persevere in it until the end, 
sure that nothing dulls the edge of truth. What decla- 
ration of independence could surpass in nobleness and 
pride this profession of faith by a soul that set its 
dignity and found its liberty in obedience ? Manning 
could wait with a firm foot for a decision that could 
change his destiny, but not the condition of his soul. 

Pius IX. , after having hesitated, after having spoken 
of the choice of Clifford as if it was to be made without 
him, had resolved, perhaps with the quite warm im- 



MANNING AS A CATHOLIC. 155 

pression of the insulto al papa which the presentation 
of Errington's name amounted to in his estimation, to 
interfere personally. He ordered special prayers and 
Masses for a month in order to call down the light of 
Heaven. The answer was not very long in coming. It 
was the Pope himself who told Manning some weeks 
later : It was properly an inspiration that I obeyed in nam- 
ing you. I incessantly heard a voice repeating to me : Name 
him, name him! This divine message Pius IX. did not 
think he should resist. On April 30, 1865, he chose 
Henry Edwad Manning to succeed Cardinal Wiseman 
as Archbishop of Westminster. 

II. 

On May 8, in the morning. Manning had just said 
his Mass in the chapel of his community of St. Mary of 
the Angels at Bayswater, when he received the official 
scroll from the secretary of the Propaganda. His first 
impulse was to go and kneel before the Blessed Sacra- 
ment. He was conscious of the crushing responsibili- 
ties that he was going to assume, but he had faith in 
the aid of Him who had done all. His first thought 
was for the portion of his new flock that clung closest 
to his heart — the twenty thousand poor children of 
London, still outside the action of the Church, for 
whom he hoped to do something. His beginnings were 
naturally marked by the spirit of conciliation : the 
Archbishop of Westminster could extend his hand to 
Provost Manning's adversaries. He was touched by 
the eagerness shown in saluting his elevation by those 
very men who should have most deplored it. The first 



156 puecell's '' manning '^ reputed. 

priest of the diocese to come to offer his congratulations 
to him was the vicar capitular, O'Neal, an opponent. 
The chapter, by its deference, hoped to make six years 
of bitter opposition be forgotten. Within two days, all 
the superiors of orders — except that of the Jesuits of 
Farm street, who permitted a few Fathers merely to 
make up for his abstention — all the heads of parishes, 
one hundred and ninety priests out of two hundred and 
fourteen, had come to pay homage to the new arch- 
bishop. The welcome was no less warm on the part of 
bishops: Dr. Ullathorne, whose name had been put 
forward for this great succession, wanted to be the first 
to congratulate his new metropolitan. 

Manning's most ardent desire was to have himself 
consecrated in Rome by the Pope in person. He gave 
it up in order to make of his consecration the symbol 
and the pledge of that happy reconciliation. After a 
retreat in the Passionist convent at Highgate, he was 
consecrated on the Thursday of Pentecost week, June 
8, 1865, fourteen years after his ordination. The cere- 
mony took place in the pro-cathedral in Moorfields, 
Bishop Ullathorne, of Birmingham, officiating, and the 
assistants being Bishop Grant, of Southwark, and 
Bishop Clifford, of Clifton. Three hundred priests 
were crowded in the nave. \Vhen the new Archbishop 
was seen entering with the procession, with his spare 
form, his pale, almost transparent countenance, still 
further emaciated by a strict fast, an old Irish woman, 
lost in the crowd, exclaimed : ' ' What a pity to take all 
this trouble for three weeks ! ' ' The end was not so 
near. Manning, who heard this exclamation, gave 



MANNING AS A CATHOLIC. 157 

himself fifteen years of activity : God granted him more 
than twenty-five. Father Vaughan, Manning's friend 
and future successor, wrote to him that the burthen 
could not be heavier, but that there was no discourage- 
ment for the apostle of the Holy Ghost in England. Wise- 
man had finished his work a few years before his death. 
Manning's was to be, in his correspondent's thought, 
altogether more ecclesiastical and more spiritual. He 
was to give to England its St. Charles Borromeo and 
its St. Bartholomew de Martyribus. Manning felt him- 
self quite strong with his motto, Sentire ciim Petro. At 
Rome, in September, Pius IX. gave him the palHum 
and paternally r.ecommended prudence to him. 

There was nothing official in the relations between 
these two men. Pius IX. loved the archbishop ten- 
derly, called him the man of Providence, entreated him 
to spare himself, to imitate that American prelate who 
had adopted as a rule never to do himself what a mere 
priest could do in his stead. As for Manning, outside 
of his convictions on the dogma of infallibilit}', he pro- 
fessed attachment mingled with veneration for the 
Pope's person. Mgr. Talbot having one day written to 
him that the Holy Father was a very good man, but, 
as he had said to him, he was not a saint, ho had his 
weaknesses, Manning, who called Pius IX. the most 
supernatural personality that he had approached, re- 
plied that Mgr. Talbot knew very well that he had the 
idea that the Pope was a saint and that the miserie 
umane which one might discover in him w^ere present 
quite as much in a St. Vincent Ferrier. If there was 
any exaggeration in this view, yet there w^as no flattery 



158 purcell's ^'manning" refuted. 

mingled with it. Manning's Ultramontanism was not 
a borrowed doctrine, adopted in order that he might 
stand well at court; it was the product not even of a 
pure work of the mind, but of a slow elaborating of 
conscience. To this soul long tossed on the troubled 
waves of Protestantism, it was at the very foot of the 
rock of St. Peter — of that rock on which Christ Himself 
had said that he would found His Church — that the 
springs of certitude, of joy and of life had bubbled up. 
It remains for me, while tracing Manning's episcopal 
career, to show how that Ultramontanism, that strict 
and absolute Catholicism, was the roj^al road by which 
this precursor of a great movement went out to meet 
modern mankind, its needs, its sufferings, and offered 
to it the only efficacious remedy, the eternal Gospel. 
In him breadth of action was in proportion to what his 
adversaries called narrowness of doctrine. By his ex- 
ample he showed the error of those who wish to lower, 
to belittle Christianity, to despoil it of its supernatural 
characteristics, so as to make it acceptable to the spirit 
of the age. The religion which he regarded as made 
for a skeptical generation, suffering, overwhelmedj and 
yet seized with its evil, on its guard against the pana- 
ceas of charlatans, having gotten over the pompous and 
misleading promises of the know-alls, proceeding, how- 
ever, in accordance with the severe methods of science 
and of criticism, is not a Christianity at a discount, 
reduced to the level of a human system of morality or 
of philosophy: it is the Christianity of the Apostles and 
of the saints; it is the folly of the Cross, it is the scan- 
dal of the Gospel with its revelation and its miracles; 



MANNING AS A CATHOLIC. 159 

it is the Cliiirch, mistress of faith and subduer of errors. 
To Manning Cathohcism, which will offer a refuge and 
a harbor to a generation tossed about on a shoreless and 
a bottomless ocean, weary of everj^thing and especially 
of itself, is not a mitigated Catholicism, toned down, 
revised and corrected ad usum Delphini, reduced to the 
sonorous inanities of the ^' Genie du Christianisme, " 
ready for all transactions with the State or with reason : 
it is the Catholicism of the great Popes and of the great 
monks; the Catholicism of unity, of authority, of infal- 
libility; the Catholicism of Joseph de Maistre or of 
Lamennais in his early life. Mankind, according to a 
beautiful expression, is satisfied only by what exceeds 
it; it accepts only what is imposed on it; it bows only 
before what commands with authority. After all, it 
was never Christianity's method to address itself to 
reason only in order to convince it. It has always been 
necessary to rise above the region of the clouds, of 
doubts, of divisions, of misunderstandings, of storms; 
to mount on the summits of faith and of the divine 
certitudes in order to reach the zone of pure springs and 
vast horizons. Manning detested that lying breadth 
which, under the pretext of facilitating access to the 
city of God, destroys its ramparts and opens its gates 
to the enemy. In his estimation there were sacred 
narrownesses, attachments to unpopular causes, that 
are the very condition of true breadth. 

Such is the deep reason for the species of dualism 
which people imagined they could detect in his episco- 
pal career. There was no contradiction in that, especi- 
ally nothing resembling the diplomacy of a Churchman 



160 purcell's "manning" refuted. 

trying to redeem the excess of his devotedness to the 
Papacy with the exaggeration of his advances to the 
democracy of labor. The two parts of this Hfe are con- 
nected like root and stem, like the tree and its fruit. 
It was necessary in the first place to assert loudly an 
uncompromising dogmatism, to make it triumph in the 
Church, at the risk of getting mixed up, perhaps 
irremediably, with opinion, before bringing to a sick 
social organism the promises and the consolations of a 
liberating Catholicism. 

Already at that time the reestablishment of unity in 
Christendom was on the order of the day. The scandal 
of those divisions with good reason preoccupied the dis- 
ciples of the Master who said: One flock, one shepherd. 

A society was formed in 1857 to work with prayer 
for the restoration of unity. Side by side with two 
hundred members of the Anglican clergy were found a 
few Catholics more zealous than enlightened. The 
Holy Office, consulted in 1864, had condemned the 
theory dear to the advocates of a sort of federation of 
the Churches, according to which there are three 
branches of Christianity, namely, the Roman Church, 
the Eastern Church, and the Anglican Church. A pro- 
test was addressed to Cardinal Wiseman, to the Holy 
Father himself. Manning was not unaware that this 
false idea of corporate reunion, that is, the negotiation 
between equals of a sort of treaty between the Churches, 
is often the chief obstacle to individual reunion, that is, 
to submission pure and simple to lawful authority. As 
a matter of fact, no matter with what sophisms the 
edifying formulas of the champions of this bastard 



MANNING AS A CATHOLIC. ICl 

federalism are rnasked, there are only two conceptions 
possible, namely, that of the visible Church, one and 
infallible, which required submission, and it is Cath- 
olicism;* that of the invisible Church never realizing 
its unity externally, being satisfied with the mystic 
communion of souls, — is that of Protestantism. Be- 
tween these two there slips in the hybrid notion of 
Anglicanism, which borrows from Protestantism its re- 
fusal to acknowledge the divine right of the centre of 
unity and which takes from Catholicism its theory of 
the Church in order to apply it, not without a manifest 
usurpation, to the most insular, the most local, the 
most dependent of the Churches. To these misplaced 
pretensions Manning, who had had experience of them, 
was pitiless. He declared most clearly that a single 
soul won was worth more in his estimation than all 
those clergymen so desirous of negotiating. The Pope 
wrote, in a certain sense from his dictation, an answer 
that did not even accord, from fear of encouraging 
illusions, the title of Reverend to these ecclesiastics, 
and Manning explained the Catholic doctrine in his 
pastoral letter of 1866. In it he affirmed that there 
w^as question, not of restoring the unity of the Church, 
• — there is only one Church, and Christ's promises have 
guaranteed to it the indefectibility of its unity as well 
as the immutability of its faith, — but of bringing back 
to that Church, the only one worthy of the name, all 

^The Encyclical, *' Satis Cognitum," in reply to renewed at- 
tempts on the part of Anglicanism to have itself recognized as a 
legitimate branch of the one and universal Church, has just defi- 
nitively laid down the Catholic principles in the matter. 
11 



162 purcell's '' manning" refuted. 

those who, by remaining separated from it, commit the 
sin of schism. This strictness very much displeased 
the Anglicans, especially Manning's former friends. 

They did not understand this attitude in regard to a 
Church which Manning judged to be so much the more 
guilty as it was nearer to the light, and as its false sem- 
blances and its fine externals kept more souls far from 
the truth. Manning in this respect had come to prefer 
by far the condition of soul of the dissenting, purely 
Protestant sects to that of Anglo-Catholicism. He 
thought that the first sympathies of the Church ought 
to go to those millions wandering here and there like sheep 
without a shepherd^ to those classes that form the heart of 
the English nation, to those souls for whom Christ died, and 
who have been robbed of their inheritance by this Anglican 
schism from which they lawfully separated themselves 
in their turn, and who, in spite of the prejudices of 
education, often show more sincerity, candor and generos- 
ity in controversy than the members of the Anglican 
Church. In these words there was a whole programme 
of action, admirably adapted to scandalize the Angli- 
cans. Manning gave them a new grievance by his atti- 
tude in the grave question of the frequenting of the 
Oxford and Cambridge universities by Catholic youth. 
The suppression of the denominational character of 
these establishments, — the laicizing, to use the techni- 
cal term, — seemed to authorize Catholic fathers of 
families not to deprive their children any longer of the 
double privilege of higher intellectual education and of 
participation in that university life which is the best 
apprenticeship for life in the vforld. Newman had not 



MANNING AS A CATHOLIC. 163 

ceased to have a sort of home-sickness for those places 
where he had lived his happiest days and reigned as 
absolute sovereign. Since the check of the plan of 
founding a Catholic University in Dublin, he was living 
a retired life in the Edgbaston Oratory, devoted to the 
direction of a secondary school. There had been 
question of placing him again at Oxford at the head of 
a house of his community, so as to exert a missionary 
activity there, on the scene of his former glory. He 
had even secured a tract of land for this purpose. The 
project grew gradually. People dreamt of the estab- 
lishment of a Catholic college affiliated with the Uni- 
versity; Newman, shuddering with a quite natural 
ardor, forgot that he himself, at Dublin, in 1851, had 
forbidden Catholic youth to sojourn at the Protestant 
universities. The adversaries of coeducation v,^ere in 
commotion. They had attendance at the Protestant 
universities condemned at Rome, and, even much more 
severely, that at the laicized universities, by Catholic 
youth, Manning had worked hard to obtain this de- 
cree. Struck by the serious inconveniences of New- 
man's plan, but far from being in touch with the prac- 
tical difficulties of such an undertaking, he was already 
dreaming of the creation of that Catholic University 
which he was to found at Kensington under the direc- 
tion of Mgr. Capel, who was to bring him so much con- 
fusion, to cost him so dear — morally and pecuniarily — 
and to end in so pitiful a check. For the moment, 
this prohibition, in v/hich Manning had so large a part, 
was very deeply felt by Newman. From that time 
dates the permanent coolness in the relations between 



164 purcell's ^'manning" refuted. 

these two men, that famous broil on which it is so 
much the more important to have a clear explanation 
as Mr. Purcell's perfidious insinuations have the more 
disfigured its history, to the detriment of Manning. 

For years already the two great converts had con- 
stantly been set in opposition to each other. Under a 
superficial analogy there was masked an almost abso- 
lute contrast of natures, of temperaments, of destinies. 
It was impossible for friends too zealous not to notice 
with some bitterness the change that had come about 
in the respective positions of Newman and of Manning 
since their abjuration. Previously, Newman was the 
king of Oxford, the oracle of Anglo-Catholicism; Man- 
ning was only an adjutant, a campaign ally. After- 
wards, Newman lived in retreat, in a sort of disgrace, 
at the head of a college for young boys; Manning was 
the Archbishop of Westminster, the primate of England, 
the confidential close friend, the respected counsellor of 
the Pope. Such a difference in their lot must of itself 
alone be worth all favors to the one, to the other all the 
severities of opinion. Why should not this opinion 
have lavished its marks of kindness on the great mind, 
on the eminent writer, the honor of English letters, who 
passed for having drawn down upon himself the half 
disgrace in which he was vegetating by his courage in 
defending causes dear to the British nation? Why 
should it not have reserved its rigors for a man who 
seemed to take upon himself as a task to brave it by 
espousing the most unpoj)ular causes, and whose rapid 
advancement people attributed to the gratitude of the 
Court of Rome ? Anglicans, Protestants, Liberals them- 



MANNING AS A CATHOLIC. 165 

selves became easily affected over the great man who 
saw himself rewarded for so many incomparable ser- 
vices done to the Church by a sort of ostracism. They 
vaguely felt, in reality, that Newman had remained one 
of them; that he had even been more so than since his 
conversion ; that, Englishman as he was to the very 
marrow of his bones, he had been thrown back towards 
the half-way solutions of a sort of Anglican Galhcanism 
since he had found himself in direct contact with the 
realities of Catholicism. They were avenged, on the 
other hand, for Manning's irreconcilable stand, for his 
boldness in flinging at the public the defiance of his 
defense of the temporal power and of infallibility, of 
his aggressive and offensive Catholicism, by attributing 
those convictions to ambition and his successes to in- 
trigue. It was under this aspect that people then saw 
him. Disraeli himself, who admired him sincerely and 
who later on became connected with him, in the rather 
too bright and highly-colored portrait that he has given 
of him in his romance of " Lothair," rests on this trait 
and makes of his Cardinal Grandison an improbable 
alloy of asceticism and Machiavellianism. Friends 
naturally were to spend their time in embittering the 
quarrel. Newman, whether he w^ould or not, was the 
centre of opposition to all that was done at the Arch- 
bishop's House. Manning perhaps did not sufficiently 
repress certain imprudent expressions used by those 
around him. Occasions for conflict were not wanting: 
the reunion of Christendom, University education, con- 
troversies relative to the Temporal Power, to the "Syl- 
labus," to Infallibility. All these divergences, how- 



166 purcell's ''manning" refuted. 

over, would have left no traces, if there had been no 
incompatibility of temperament between these two men. 
I have already sketched these two physiognomies with 
their essential differences : the man in his study, of 
subtle thought, passed master in the most learned 
mental tilting; the sworn enemy of rash generalizations 
and of badly-defined assertions; in reality a skeptic by 
nature like all intellectualists : the man of action, always 
in the breach; neither having nor taking time to polish 
his thought or to round his phrase, going straight to 
the object, namely, the salvation of souls; liking to 
proceed by massive and square assertions, hating de- 
ductions and argumentations. Newman was one of the 
renovators of apologetics, a high-soaring dialectician; if 
he fought a great deal and frequently humiliated reason, 
he also liked it very much and often appealed to it. 
Manning's idea was that the priest's mission is to give 
testimony by his word, but especially by his life, to the 
supernatural truths of Revelation. 

These deep theoretical disagreements would not have 
sufficed to bring these two champions of Catholicism 
into conflict, without their characters receiving a shock. 
If Manning was a man of authority, if he required of 
his subordinates the loyal obedience that he practised 
towards his superior, Newman had at last come to 
losing to some extent the sense of reality in the artificial 
atmosphere to which he confined himself. More than 
ever the idol of a cenacle; always surrounded by pupils 
who were to believe him on his word and by disciples 
ready to swear in verba magistri ; slightly intoxicated — 
who would not have been so? — by the incense that 



MANNING AS A CATHOLIC. 167 

came to him from all directions and even from Protest- 
ants and Liberals, Newman was to see a certain dis- 
honesty, explainable only by personal interest, in the 
condition of a mind in radical opposition to his own on 
everything, even when his steps were directed along the 
same wa}^ Manning's elevation seemed to confirm 
this unjust view. Between the infallibilist Archbishop 
and the infallible Oratorian good relations were difficult. 
It follows, at least, from the letters published by Mr. 
Purcell, that Manning was ever the first to seek a recon- 
ciliation, the last to despair of it. He solicited New- 
man's presence at his consecration; the latter consented 
to come, but in the least gracious of answers. Each 
time that he had to address some congratulations to 
the Archbishop, he knew how, with somewhat of the 
art of the unfriendliness of devotees, to slip bitter- 
sweet epigrams into them. When at last Manning one 
day wanted, by a frank verbal explanation, to dissipate 
those painful misunderstandings, he ran up against a 
refusal, and he received from his old friend, whose 
hierarchical superior he was after all, an almost out- 
rageous act of accusation. In it Newman declared his 
incurable distrust; he denounced in it a constant con- 
tradiction between the prelate's language and his con- 
duct; he at last said forcibly that, every time that he 
had to do with the Archbishop of Westminster, he 
knew not whether he was on his head or on his heels. 
By thus forgetting charity and respect, the author of 
this demand exposed himself to a cruel rejoinder: had 
he not himself been constantly accused of Jesuitism, of 
casuistry and of duplicity, and had he not had 



1G8 purcell's ^' manning '* refuted. 

to answer Kingsley's odious calumnies with his 
' ' Apologia ? " -'^ Manning did not reply exactly in this 
tone, but he had to turn some of his imputations back 
on his correspondent. This far from edifying dialogue 
was still kept up for some time, with long explanations 
by Manning, with short and sharp replies by Newman. 
It came to an end when, after the example of that pre- 
late in " Le Lutrin, ' ' who dismisses the canons aghast 
and blessed^ the illustrious Oratorian shot this Parthian 
arrow against his adversary : "In the meantime it is 
my purpose to say seven Masses for your intention, in 
the midst of the difficulties and anxieties of your eccles- 
iastical duties. ' ' Manning, though surprised, answered 
with tit for tat: "lam very much obliged for your 
amiable purpose of saying seven Masses for my inten- 
tion, and it would give me great pleasure to celebrate 
one for yours, once a month, during the coming year.'^ 
This sacristy wheedling was, fortunately, not exactly 
the last word between two men of this character. After 
the accession of Leo XIII. , when an effort was made to 
repair the long injustice of the Court of Rome towards 
the great athlete of the intellectual restoration of Cath- 

*One day about tliat time tlie historian, Froude, said to a friend 
v.'ho liad just published it in a volume of reminiscences : * ' The 
other day I met Newman walking in the park. Every movement 
which that man made, made me feel that one should not believe a 
single word he said." (A. K. H. B., *'The Last Years of St. 
Andrews," 1890-1895, London, 1896.) This sally from the mouth 
of a man who had not merely been a disciple, but a friend of New- 
man' s, is even more scandalous than unjust. It none the less indi- 
cates that there was an order of reproach which Newman should 
have taken good care to avoid against his neighbor. 



MAJs'NING AS A CATHOLIC. 169 

olicism, the Archbishop of Westminster was not the 
last, nor the least zealous, in asking the cardinal's 
purple for the Edgbaston recluse. Unfortunately, a 
regrettable misunderstanding came near changing this 
natural occasion of reconciliation into a fresh reason for 
quarreling. Manning thought too hastily that the 
scruples of a man who did not dislike haying himself 
entreated or laying down his conditions were a final re- 
fusal; Newman was more seriously wrong in seeing 
double-dealing on the part of the Archbishop in an 
error arising from the difficulty of deciphering the 
hieroglyphics of his subtle casuistry. It all ended in 
mutual explanation and understanding. Later on, the 
two cardinals who had come out of Anglicanism met 
twice in London. It is characteristic of these two men 
that, whilst Manning opened his arms to embrace the 
adversary who, with so sharp a rapier, had inflicted 
such penetrating blows upon him, Newman, having re- 
turned to the Edgbaston Oratory, found nothing but 
astonishment to express to his friends in regard to this 
fraternal embrace. 

The Archbishop of Westminster, however, had found 
himself called to play a leading part in matters of great 
importance. The definition of the dogma of the Sov- 
ereign Pontiff's personal infallibility was in order. 
This story is still so close to us that it is difficult to 
write it with all the impartiality that it requires. 
Until the present time the great body of the public 
have perhaps looked at it through the stories of its 
adversaries. The opposition had, to a large extent, re- 
ceived its recruits from the camp of that Liberal Cath- 



170 purcell's '^ manning" refuted. 

olicism whose noble champions, the Montalemberts, 
the Gratrys, the Dupanloups, the Lacordaires, for such 
a good reason won over the sympathies of all generous 
minds. In France, no doubt, nearly all those who had 
combated the definition submitted, like docile children 
of the Church, in doing which, moreover, they had so 
much the less diflQculty as, after all, they did only their 
elementary duty as Catholics, and as most of them had 
disputed only the opportuneness of this decision. 

With many there none the less remained a sort of 
unfavorable prejudice against the chief promoters of 
the Council's decree. Two considerations, however, 
seem rather well adapted to weaken this impression. 
In the first place, the ulterior development of the 
destinies of Old Catholicism, that is to say, of that 
fraction of opponents, especially in Germany, who did 
not bow to the proclamation of the dogma, is scarcely 
of a nature to awaken very keen sympathies. If ever 
Church or sect rested with all its weight on the civil 
power, if ever nascent schism thought it could take ad- 
vantage, not only of the favors of the State, but also of 
a persecution directed against the rival Church, as was 
the Kulturkampf, it was indeed Old Catholicism in 
Germany. In the clergy and among the laity of that 
little group there were highly respectable men: Doel- 
linger's name was of itself alone a watchword to it. It 
cannot be denied, however, that this pretended reform 
has miscarried, — or rather that it deserved to miscarry, 
— like all so-called spiritual movements that appeal to 
the secular power and that offer to it, in exchange for 
its protection, the services of a State religion. On the 



MANNING AS A CATHOLIC. 171 

other hand, the definition of the dogma of infallibility 
by no means produced the result predicted by its ad- 
versaries. It might have appeared to a whole large 
school, on the contrary, that there had been something 
providential in this consummation of the work concen- 
trating the spiritual authority in the hands of the Vicar 
of Jesus Christ. On the eve of the events that were to 
despoil the Holy See of its patrimony and to reduce 
the Papacy to the condition of a purely ideal power, it 
was not a matter of indifference that around the brow 
of an old and feeble priest there should be the aureola 
of a divine prerogative. And since then have we not 
seen that power, moreover, so carefully surrounded by 
guarantees and limitations by the constitution ' ' De 
Romano Pontifice," serve especially to the realizing of 
the noble scheme that had been dreamt of by the 
Liberal Catholics, that is to say, the adversaries of this 
dogma? Did not Leo XIII. 's pontificate, thanks to 
that great work of the pontificate of Pius IX. , prepare 
the way for the accomplishment of the ideal conceived 
too early and especially followed up with too imperious 
arrogance by Lamennais and the editors of the Avenirf 
A Papacy sufficiently far removed above the region of 
egoist interests, passions and rivalries to assume the 
chief direction of the social reform movement, without 
ceasing to be the keystone of the edifice of human soci- 
ety — a Church resting with sufficient solidity on the rock 
of unity, sufficiently sure of its divine mandate to offer to 
a suffering generation the remedy for all its ills — was it 
not exactly what all these Catholics eager for reconcilia- 
tion between Christianity and the spirit of the age were 



172 purcell's ^'manning" refuted. 

ardently looking for? AVhatever judgment one may 
pass on the realization of this fine dream, the man who 
clearly conceived the close solidarity between the two 
parts of this programme — the man who wanted the 
Papacy to be mistress in the Church and the Church 
the servant of mankind — clearly merits that, in order 
to appreciate his work, w^e should cut loose from party 
spirit and from its prejudices. 

Before, during and after the Council, Manning was 
one of the most ardent champions of the definition. 
He liked to recall the surname of " Diabolus Concilii" 
which had been given to him by his adversaries. At 
the jubilee of St= Peter, in 1867, being present in Rome 
with five hundred and twenty of his colleagues, he had, 
along with the bishop of Ratisbon, taken a vow to pro- 
cure the proclamation of the dogma of infallibility and 
to say special prayers to this effect every day. Though 
the bull of convocation, dated September 13, 1868, did 
not expressly state the question, the Archbishop of 
Westminster none the less hurried [to present to the 
Pope tw^o petitions in favor of the definition, emanating 
from his diocese and signed by the chapter and by the 
Oratory house at Brompton. During fourteen months 
the preparations for those grand sessions which Chris- 
tendom had not seen for three centuries, since the clos- 
ing of the Council of Trent, excited Europe. The press 
resounded with virulent controversies in which were 
engaged especially the Augsburg Gazette^ the Civilta Cat- 
tolica and the Univers, and in which the bishop of Or- 
leans, Mgr. Dupanloup, took a most active part. Four 
great committees of cardinals and of prelates, respect- 



MANNING AS A CATHOLIC. 173 

ively presided over by Their Eminences Bilio, Caterini, 
von Reisach and Bizzari, elaborated the schemata rela- 
tive to dogma, to canon law, to mix^d politico-religious 
questions and to regulars. The choice of the consulting 
theologians, called to assist the Fathers of the Council, 
was a serious matter. Mgr. Dupanloup wished in vain 
to have Newman as his. The English bishops had left 
him to one side, either because they had credited an 
improbable report according to which the Pope wanted 
to have recourse directly to his lights, or because his 
opposition to the dogma of infallibility had put him in 
too bad odor at Rome. The struggle became strangely 
animated, obstinate, and of still doubtful issue. Doel- 
linger was not satisfied with having recourse to the 
lawful weapons of theology, of erudition, nor even with 
denouncing the triumj)h of the Jesuits, by reproach- 
ing Manning with the zeal of a convert. He entertained 
no scruple as to making an appeal to the civil power 
and as to claiming, in the name of a so-called Liberal- 
ism and in the interest of the principles of modern 
society, the resurrection of the veto by the crowned 
heads. The German bishops, in the address which 
they adopted at Fulda, placed themselves on the more 
circumscribed ground of the inopportuneness of the 
definition. Mgr. IMaret published his great work, be- 
neath whose learned and ponderous dissertations some 
thought they discerned the menace of interference by 
that Liberal Catholic party which had just come into 
power in France with the Ollivier-Daru ministry. Mgr. 
Dupanloup never tired in eloquent protests. Manning 
had issued a pastoral letter on the burning subject. 



174 PURCELL^S '* manning" REFUTED. 

He was very clearly accused of heresy by the bishop of 
Orleans; and it was necessary to answer this passionate 
controversialist, who did not know English, that he had 
condemned a mistake made by the French translator. 

The hour for the opening of the Council was ap- 
proaching; Manning set out on his journey. At Paris 
he saw M. Thiers, who made to him the professions of 
faith of the most edifying deism and naively said to 
him : Do not make life too hard for us ! Do not condemn 
the principles of 89! M. Guizot declared that the temporal 
power was the last pillar of European order, and that he 
saw in the Council the only moral power capable of restoring 
peace to the world. The first business of this assembly 
was the electing of the deputations or committees on 
which the episcopate of each nationalit}^ counted one 
or several representatives. It was not on Manning, 
but on Grant, that the choice of the English bishops 
fell. The Italians made up for this by electing the 
Archbishop of Westminster. To trace in detail the 
history of the Vatican Council does not enter into my 
plan. I must be satisfied with characterizing Manning's 
part in it. That part was threefold : within, among his 
colleagues, in the preparatory labors and the general 
discussions; without, close to the Pope and close to the 
witty and distinguished agent whom England kept 
without accrediting him at Rome. His activity was 
immense. It was equal to that of his great adversary, 
Mgr. Dupanloup, whom he was astounded to see send- 
ing off packages of manuscript every day. With both 
of them it was a matter of conscience: if the one de- 
clared that he would shed tears of blood at the thought of 



MANNING AS A CATHOLIC. 175 

all the souls that would he lost by an inopportune definition, 
the other sincerely believed that the salvation of the 
Church and of the world depended on the promulgation 
of this truth. Inside the Council Manning struggled 
energetically, at first to have signed and to present the 
postidatum or the proposition that was to place the 
question on the order of the day, then to obtain a 
favorable report from the delegation de postidatis or in- 
itiative committee, and afterwards to get rid of the 
motions for adjournment or the amendments and to 
get a vote on the real issue. On this ground he dis- 
played all the qualities that w^ould have made of him 
a parliamentarian of the highest order. At the same 
time, as good judges tell us, he showed himself the 
prince of diplomatists. The familiar access that was ac- 
corded to him by Pius IX. 's paternal kindness assured 
to him valuable advantage which he took no care not 
to use. He had the privilege of entering by a hidden 
stairway and by a secret door leading to the Pope's 
apartments in the Vatican, and he has himself de- 
scribed the stupefaction of the diplomatists or of the 
ecclesiastics who were patiently waiting their turn for 
an audience in the Sovereign Pontiff's antechambers, 
on seeing this visitor leave whom they had not seen 
entering. He made use of this privilege on several 
occasions in order to bring energetic counsels to the 
Pope or to provoke decisive steps; he had never turned 
it to more useful advantage than on the day when, 
having learned that Doellinger, to whom the opposition 
had given the schema of the constitution, was preparing 
to drive the government of the king of Bavaria to take 



176 purcell's ''manning" refuted. 

the initiative in a previous intervention of the powers, 
he ran to ask the Holy Father to relieve him from his 
oath of secrecy, in order to be able to communicate to 
Mr. Odo Russell the true state of affairs, and to put him 
at the same time in a position to prevent the Gladstone 
Cabinet from reaching an unfortunate decision. 

It was in his relations with Mr. Odo Russell that 
Manning especially gave proof of the qualities that 
would have made of him an ambassador or an eminent 
statesman. He had formed close relations with this 
lordly diplomatist who for ten years filled with distinc- 
tion at Rome a mission that had no official character. 
Thoroughly \Yhig and Protestant as he was. Lord John 
Russell's nephew had acquired a passionate taste for 
the Eternal City, wished only to prolong his sojourn 
there, and had become a convinced advocate of the 
maintenance of the temporal power and of the defini- 
tion of the dogma of infallibility. Such a condition of 
mind in Her Britannic Majesty's representative made the 
cultivating of his acquaintance valuable. Besides the 
interviews and conversations of the week, every Satur- 
day, the day on which the Council held no session, the 
Archbishop and the diplomatist agreed to meet in order 
to take a long stroll on foot in the Campagna. There 
the conversation touched on everything, from the great 
eternal problems to those trifles that formed the pasture 
of what Louis Veuillot called the gossipings of the Council 
Manning there said to his chatting companion, and 
through him to Lord Clarendon or to Gladstone, all 
that he could and ought to say to them. It was a fine 
success for him to make himself a docile and safe in- 



MANNING AS A CATHOLIC. 177 

strum ent of the diplomatist who was later on, at Berlin, 
to play at close range, and not on such unequal terms, 
with that rude adversary who was called Bismarck. 
The devouring activity of the opposition was doomed 
to failure from the moment that the governments in 
which it had placed its hope held aloof. In the British 
Cabinet all the credit that Mr. Odo Russell enjoyed 
with his chief, Lord Clarendon, was required in order 
to counterbalance in Mr. Gladstone's mind the influ- 
ence of the advice given by Sir John Acton,* Dcell- 
inger's friend and the great leader of the newspaper 
campaign in England and in Germany, who energeti- 
cally supported the proposal that the Munich Cabinet 
interfere. France, at first tempted to make Napoleon 
III. play the part of heir to Louis XIV. , by reviving 
the veto of the crowned heads, was absorbed in the 
grave concerns of the plebiscite and of foreign politics. 
In vain did the minority become obstinate, keep up a 
menacing agitation outside, within practise a sort of 
obstruction, exhaust all the means of adjournment, 
make parade of the probable figure of its votes,— which 
it estimated at between a hundred and forty and a 
hundred and fifty, by adding the juxta modums to the 
non placets, — try, in fine, to intimidate the minority by 
exalting the moral force of an opposition more than 
half made up of the bishops of France and of Germany 
and recruited from among the glories of the Church. 
In the debates it did not appear that this superiority, a 

* Now Lord Acton, lately a member of the Gladstone-Eoseberj 
Cabinet from 1892 to 1895 and appointed to the chair of modem 
history in Cambridge in succession to Sir John Seeley. 

12 



178 purcell's ^'manning" eefuted. 

little too sure of itself, shone undisputed. Cardinal 
Bilio ranked the discourse delivered by the Archbishop 
of Westminster, in the general discussion, as on an 
equality with the harangues of the Strossmayers and 
the Dupanloups. Manning himself finely said: "They 
were wise: we were fools. Well! strange though it be, 
it has happened that the wise had been always wrong 
and the fools always right. ' ' Events came hurriedly. 
Disappointed in the hope of interference by the civil 
power, and beaten on their proposal to prorogue the 
Council sine die, the opposing bishops left Rome or de- 
cided to hold aloof. On May 14, 1870, the general dis- 
cussion had been opened on the schema de Romano 
Pontifice. On July 13 a majority of four hundred and 
fiftj^-one votes against eighty- eight nan placets and sixty- 
two placet juxta modums adopted in general congregation 
the chapter on Papal infallibility and the immediate 
jurisdiction of the Holy See. The Pope, entreated by 
a delegation from the minority to interfere in favor of 
conciliation, did not think he could comply with this 
wish. Five days later the Council held its fourth ses- 
sion and ratified its preceding vote by five hundred and 
thirty-three placets against two non placets. 

Next daj^, July 19, war was declared between France 
and Germany. In the whirlwind of those tragic 
events, the peculiarly religious question seemed rele- 
gated to the rear. One might believe that Providence 
had allo¥/ed the Papacy to reach the last degree of a 
slow evolution only to reprecipitate it from the highest 
eminence into the abyss: id lapsu graviore mat. The 
Italian troops, docilely attached to the talons of the 



MANNING AS A CATHOLIC. 179 

victorious Prussians, entered Rome on September 20 
through the far from glorious breach of the Porta Pia. 
AVas it the end of the spiritual authority at the same 
time as of the temporal power of the Holy See ? Was 
it the chastisement for the proclamation of infallibility ? 
Manning did not believe anything of the kind. While 
maintaining the protest of violated right against the 
sacrilegious usurpation of the patrimony of St. Peter, 
he saw in a trice that a new era was opening, in which 
the Papacy, despoiled of its temporal domains, reduced 
to its mere spiritual prerogative, was going to become 
the arbiter of peoples and kings, if it knew how to use 
its royal poverty and its ideal power. In his estima- 
tion the definition of the dogma of infallibility on the 
eve of that brutal invasion was providential in the 
highest degree. Perhaps, in the closing years of his 
life, when his ideas were fully ripened and when his 
hatred of the fatal alliances between earthly causes, 
contingent principles, like that of legitimacy, and the 
cause of God and Plis Church, was strengthened, one 
would not have to press him very hard in order to 
make him acknowledge that the destruction of the 
temporal power had in it also something providential. 
Not that he dreamt of impossible and dishonoring 
transactions between the Vatican and the Quirinal, or 
that he wavered in the imprescriptible claim of the 
necessary sovereignty of the head of the Catholic 
Church. Certainly it was not in the Archbishop of 
Westminster, — convert as he was, by the virile practice 
of the regime of poverty and of the independence of a 
Church entirely separated from the State, with the 



180 purcell's ''manning" refuted. 

doctrine of pure and simple liberty, as in England and 
in America, — it was not in him that one ought to look 
for an advocate of those bastard concordats that would 
reduce the common Father of the faithful to the role of 
chaplain of the House of Savoy. A devoted son, a 
faithful friend of that Pius IX. , who rewarded him with 
so much zeal by raising him to the cardinalate in 1875 
and from whom he had the consolation of receiving a 
tender adieu, Addio, carissimo^ on his death bed, before 
piously closing his eyes, Manning would have thought 
he was betraying his benefactor and his own past by 
lending himself to the squinting diplomacy of those 
great conciliators who would sacrifice all the rights of 
conscience to a smile from the powerful ones of this 
world. 

His feeling was quite different. He has expressed it 
in his secret diary, in which he equally repudiates the 
two schools, both of which lead to the spiritual as well 
as the temporal abdication of the Papacy, the one by 
feigning to count on a miracle, the other by preaching 
inaction as the most sacred of duties. We ought to 
know, he exclaimed as far back as 1876, whether v/e 
ought to shut ourselves up in a new ark like Noe, or 
should not rather, like all the Pontiffs since Leo the 
Great, act on the world. And he added that the par- 
able of the lost sheep suffices to settle the question. So 
this time again the source of Manning's politics, the 
secret of the evolution that was going to make of the 
champion of the temporal power and of infallibility, in 
the latter part of his career, the apostle of the reforming 
Papacy and of social Catholicism, must be sought in 



MANNING AS A CATHOLIC. 181 

the depths of a truly priestly conscience and in the 
ardent desire of saving souls. 

This noble conception of the Papacy liberating itself 
by liberating the Church, conquering the world by force 
of serving it, was the inspiration of the last twenty 
years of this life. Naturally it led Manning farther 
outside of the purely ecclesiastical domain. There, 
however, he still waged fierce combats. The most for- 
midable adversary with whom he had to cross swords 
was Mr. Gladstone, who took advantage of his return 
to private life in 1874 to uphold, in his "Vaticanism" 
and other pamphlets, that it was impossible for Catho- 
lics, by accepting the dogma of infallibility, to observe 
a loyal allegiance to their sovereign. It was at a great 
sacrifice that Manning threw himself into this contro- 
versy which again interrupted for fifteen years a friend- 
ship that of old had already been suspended by his 
conversion and gradually renewed since 1865. No 
more than was customary did he keep aloof from this 
painful duty. , It was indeed the same juvenile zeal 
that he continued to exercise in the administration of 
his diocese and in the conduct of his spiritual functions, 
particularly in preaching, in the directing of consciences 
and in the education of the clergy, so dear to his heart. 
If his journeys to Rome became a little less frequent, it 
must especially be attributed to the progress of the age. 
Made a cardinal in 1875, he knew how to wear the 
purple with a simple dignity that further enhanced its 
splendor. Ascetic in regard to himself, he followed a 
regimen of absolute frugality and drank only water,* 

* The Cardinal had become an abstainer from being merely tern- 



182 purcell's ^'manning" refuted. 

but he continued to show to others a hospitality with- 
out display, yet in conformity with his rank. In Eng- 
land all the hostilities of the beginning had not been 
disarmed; more than one hatred of the devotees was 
smouldering under the ashes ; but the hostile voices 
had become silent; his authority among Catholics w^as 
almost equal to his popularity among outsiders. In 
Rome, though he suffered from pointing out a certain 
decadence there, a certain contraction of mind, he was 
always a power. He was seen there, not only under 
Pius IX., but, after this Pontiff's death, at the conclave 
in which an assembly of Italian cardinals, among whom 
figured Their Eminences Franchi, Bilio, Bartolini, 
Monaco and Nina, offered the tiara in all sincerity to 
the Archbishop of Yfestminster, and in which he was 
one of the chief promoters and authors of the election 
of Cardinal Pecci. This simple fact is quite injurious 
to the legend of antagonism between Leo XIII. and 
Manning. If there w^as not between them the unique 
friendship that bound the latter to Pius IX. , the new 
Pope w^as careful to lavish on the Cardinal- Archbishop 
of Westminster, at the time of the journey that he made 
ad limina o.postolorum after his accession, the marks of 

perate. When one day at a temperance gathering he said: *'I 
drink wine only on my doctor's orders," a voice called out to him : 
"Change your doctor," He did so. When on another occasion, 
without giving his name, he was urging an Irish laborer whom he 
met in the street to "sign the pledge" (to drink no more), and 
when he added by way of argument : "I have signed it," the man 
he was conversing with, who had recognized him at once, overflow- 
ing with humor like all his countrymen, said to him with a tAvinkle 
in his eye : " Oh, sir, no doubt you needed it !" 



MANNING AS A CATHOLIC. 183 

well-merited confidence and deference, and to follow 
his advice about persons and things in England. It 
suffices to recall the part that was taken by Manning 
in the triumph of Cardinal Gibbons' ideas before the 
supreme tribunal to which they had been referred, and 
to point out the thorough agreement between Leo 
XIII. 's great encyclicals and all the religious and so- 
cial conceptions of the Archbishop of Westminster, in 
order to refute these foolish inventions. 

III. 

Manning, as soon as the Vatican Council had realized 
his ecclesiastical programme, was able, without fear of 
being attacked from behind or of seeing the earth open 
under his feet, to follow out the realization of his social 
programme. He had quite naturally been led to this 
order of concerns by the exercise of a charity that had 
brought him into contact with all the sufferings of our 
time. In those frightful resorts of the East End of 
London he had learned to know that wretchedness of 
which material poverty and the lack of everything are 
only one of the traits, and not the worst; which is de- 
graded by the conditions of its existence, to which the 
very excess of its needs precludes the hope of rising to 
the surface, and which is made criminal in spite of 
itself by the infamy of the circumstances to which it is 
subjected. He had gone down to the bottom of that 
hell compared with which that of Dante is a sojourn of 
the blessed. There he had met that hero of Protestant 
charity, Lord Shaftesbury. One tastes the purest and 
highest of joys on seeing these two great Christians, 



184 purcell's ^'manning" refuted. 

placed at the antipodes of thought and of life, the one 
a Cardinal Archbishop of the holy Roman and Ultra- 
montane Church, the other an uncompromising Protest- 
ant overflowing with Bibhcal indignation against the 
great prostitute of Babylon, shake hands and commune 
together in the name of that love of mankind out of 
which the rehgion of Christ has made charity. Both 
of them conservative by origin, by position, by instinct, 
by intellect, both of them by contact with those real- 
ities contracted a socialism sui generis against which the 
demonstrations of political economy lose their force, are 
powerless. No one is ignorant of the glorious part 
taken by Lord Shaftesbury in legislation for the pro- 
tection of children and of labor. It remains for me to 
say what Manning's activit}^ was in this order. 

His disposition, and circumstances also, had long 
kept him apart, after his abjuration, from undenomi- 
national associations. In 1871 he was called to sit in 
the committee that had been organized at the Mansion 
House to come to the aid of the needs of Paris, after 
the siege. It was his beginning. From that time on 
there was scarcely a philanthropic work or one for the 
improvement of morals, outside the domain in which 
the rival Churches display their flags, in which the 
Archbishop of Westminster was not a born member. 
It was a curious and instructive spectacle to see the re- 
ception given, the rank accorded to this prince of the 
Church of Rome in a thoroughly Protestant country 
and one in which the law, even only yesterday as it 
■were, recognized the Catholic priest only to brand him 
w-ith civil and political incapacity. Personally, Man- 



MANNING AS A CATHOLIC. 185 

ning scarcely cared for these homages: he attached 
value to them only by reason of establishing precedents 
for fixing the position of his successor or bringing the 
condition of his colleagues into prominence. So far 
did he carry this feeling of sohdarity that, later on, 
when the last barriers in his way had been removed, 
and when he was invited to the Court or to the Prince 
of Wales' , he accepted these amiable attentions of the 
Queen or of the heir to the throne only in so far as 
they were not addressed to him personally, exception- 
ally, but to his dignity, and when his brethren of the 
episcopate could take advantage of them. Another 
very serious innovation was the calling of this Cardinal 
Archbishop to sit on several of those royal commissions 
to which the Enghsh Government likes to entrust in- 
quiries on subjects of public interest. Manning took 
part with the Prince of Wales in that which so pro- 
foundly studied the question of workingmen' s lodgings, 
and he exerted a powerful influence on it. The 
Queen's Ministers also had recourse to his enlighten- 
ment in the matter of legislation against intemperance. 
From all these supererogatory tasks which presented 
themselves he did not think that he was free to hold 
aloof, in the first place and especially because of their 
intrinsic utility, then also with a view to the manifest 
triumph that his mere presence in these oiS&cial bodies 
assured to the principles of toleration. His heart, how- 
ever, was less in these labors, which in a certain sense 
belong to the administrative order, than in his own 
works of relief and assistance. 

It cannot be too often asserted, because it answers 



186 purcell's ''manning" refuted. 

certain doctrinal statements according to which theo- 
retical devotedness to social reform would always be in 
inverse ratio to practical activity for the comforting of 
wretchedness: it was by the royal road of charity; it 
was by carrying out the fundamental precept of the 
Gospel; it was by following as closely as possible in the 
footsteps of Jesus Christ that Manning reached that 
broad and bold view of the evils of our society and of 
the best manner of remedying them. The first work to 
which he devoted himself was that of temperance. He 
had seen with his own eyes and touched with his own 
hands the effects of alcoholism, perhaps the greatest 
scourge of our civilization: the family destroyed; chil- 
dren the innocent heirs of all the ills of body and soul 
and victims of abandonment or of bad treatment ; 
drinkers the slaves of a pitiless tyrant, gradually ruined 
in their health, disgusted with work, forgetting the way 
to the workshop and that to the church; in short, hell 
upon earth, in the heart of our great cities. In the 
presence of such a state of things Manning was not a 
man to fold his arms. He not only appealed to all the 
resources of religion — it was always the best of his 
forces in that holy crusade — he had recourse to every 
means of action, to association, to enthusiasm, to every- 
thing that awakens the conscience and strengthens it, 
to everything that moves and stirs the popular soul. 
He founded, he propagated the League of the Cross. 
He wore his cardinal's robes on the platforms of public 
assemblies. In the beginning, and for a long time, he 
found only repugnance and hostility in the ranks of 
the clergy and of the pious laity. His resolutely mod- 



MANNING AS A CATHOLIC. 187 

ern and popular methods frightened the wise and the 
reasonable, and were revolting to the delicate. He was 
reproached with borrowing something of his noisy 
means of propaganda from that Salvation Army for 
which, moreover, within the limits prescribed by his 
impeccable orthodoxy, he openly professed keen sym- 
pathy. Some had a grudge against him for making 
himself too familiar with his Leaguers, especially with 
those tried lieutenants out of whom he had formed the 
CardlnaVs bodyguard. His annual feast of the League 
of the Cross at the Crystal Palace, with that quasi-mili- 
tary organization, those banners, those bands of music, 
those distinctive ribbons, that sort of review held by 
the commander-in-chief, that prince of the Church har- 
anguing the multitude, those frenzied acclamations, all 
that troubled and roused to indignation those well-fed 
and ponderous Pharisees whose horizon never extended 
beyond the walls of a sacristy. Xa}^ more: some grave 
doctors expressed doubts regarding the perfect doctrinal 
correctness of a movement that seemed to give to tem- 
perance, to abstinence even, a disproportion ed place in 
the catalogue of the theological virtues. 

Manning let them talk. Si hominibus placerem, non 
essem sei^vus Dei: This was his whole answer to these 
critics. He went on his way, giving all his spare mo- 
ments to this propaganda: even during several years — 
truly dangerous excesses — his brief summer vacations; 
practising abstinence himself; making himself accessible 
at every hour to his staff, or even to the first repentant 
drinker who came to ask him for aid and advice. Such 
zeal must have its reward. Gradually, in proportion 



188 purcell's ''manning" refuted. 

as the work grew, objections disappeared. The secular 
priests in hundreds, the rehgious orders in bodies, be- 
came associated in this activity. The League of the 
Cross multiplied its branches over the entire surface of 
the country, and counted its members by tens of thou- 
sands. The Cardinal's bodyguards were fourteen hun- 
dred. Children were enrolled in large numbers. One 
day, in the presence of death. Manning could write : 
One of my greatest joys is that I have saved many poor 
drunkards. 

The second branch of his activity to which it is meet 
to call attention here is that which has reference to 
childhood. This ever had the first claim on him. 
When he was made Archbishop, his first impulse was 
to think joyfully of all that he was going to be able to 
do for those poor children deprived of the succors of 
the Church, the number of whom in his diocese he 
estimated at twenty thousand. We know how, to the 
great indignation of those Christians who prefer a mon- 
ument of cut stone to an edifice of living souls, Man- 
ning, who had begun by buying a vast tract of land, 
did not feel himself obliged to bring to completion the 
building of the cathedral planned and begun by Wise- 
man, but was satisfied with the temporary pro-cathe- 
dral, while directing all his efforts and that of the 
donors to the education of the children.* It was the 

* Manning allowed the poor children of the neighborhood to 
make a garden for their play out of the enclosure intended for the 
building of the future cathedral, As for the Archbishop's House, 
which he purchased and in which his successor still resides, it was 
an immense bare barracks, built to serve as a club house for the 



MANNING AS A CATHOLIC. 189 

time when England, under the Gladstone ministry and 
under the direction of Mr. Forster, adopted that great 
system of popular education which was to give so poAv- 
erful an impulse to the diffusion of light, but which 
laid down in an urgent and acute form the question of 
religious instruction. Opinion had not yet reached the 
point at which it could lay hold of this great truth, that 
liberty of conscience and the rights of parents are none 
the less injured by a public education, distributed in 
the name of the State and at the expense of the tax- 
payers, from which the name of God and religion are 
banished, than by a system of denominational education 
imposed on all. It was necessary, then, to maintain and 
even to develop the denominational schools, especially 
for a minority like the Catholics ; it was furthermore 
necessary to found and to support at great expense 
orphanages, industrial schools, houses of reformatory 
training for thousands of children who, in non-Catholic 
establishments, would have risked losing their faith. 
That was Manning's work, and it was colossal. The 
proof that he succeeded in it is, in the first place, the 
spectacle of those large and handsome diocesan and 
parish schools.* Then it is the important part which 

non-commissioned officers of the regiment of the Guards. He was 
attracted by the size and the austere simplicity of the place, where 
he camped until the end. 

*In 1891 there were 3,204 Catholic children in the orphanages, 
the Public Aid schools, etc., of London, all subject to the periodical 
surveillance of a diocesan inspector; 2,253 children in charitable 
asylums, and 22,580 other children in the Catholic free schools of 
the diocese. 



190 purcell's ''manning" refuted. 

the Archbishop of Westminster played in the great 
commission of inquiry on primary education, in which 
he was truly the inspirer of the conclusions of the re- 
port in favor of amending the law of 1870. In the last 
place, it is the plan that he proposed to the House of 
Commons, then deferred from its regular order with the 
promise of being taken up next year, and in which 
Cardinal Vaughan and his suffragans, in spite of many 
defects, welcome a sincere effort to give satisfaction to 
the claims of the Church. 

Manning, moreover, did not confine himself to this 
somewhat professional activity. The man who said 
that a child^s tear not wiped away cries to God as loudly as 
blood spilt on the ground, was the born patron of all 
works of protection, of saving and of defence for child- 
hood. He cooperated in particular, and with unpar- 
alleled zeal, with the great undenominational society 
founded and directed by a dissenting pastor, the Rev. 
Benjamin Waugh, to prevent and suppress cruelty to 
children. When the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette 
undertook his campaign against criminal sensuality and 
its attacks on minors, Mr. Stead had no more intrepid 
aider and abettor than the Cardinal Archbishop, who 
went so far in his generosity as not to disavow publicly 
the pranks into which an indiscreet zeal dragged his 
protege. This way of committing himself to any one 
who showed that he was animated with a truly gener- 
ous spirit and seemed disposed to serve mankind, 
greatly scandalized some of those around Manning. 
Those who imagined that they could give him a lesson 
on the danger of these acquaintances did not return to 



MANNING AS A CATHOLIC. 191 

the attack; the priest, the prelate, the prince arose and 
relegated them to the place which they should not have 
left. 

Yet all this activity could not fail to bear all its 
fruits in a mind like Manning's, accessible to the end 
to the teachings of experience. In politics his starting 
point had been that of a Conservative pure and simple, 
of a straight-laced Tory. As long as he remained an 
Anglican, he remained faithful to that party. He 
looked at all questions from the standpoint of the 
national Church. Ecclesiasticism to some extent stifled 
in him Christianity and its inspirations. All that was 
changed after his conversion. He was no longer a 
member of the Church of England, but of the Church in 
England. To him the civil power was no longer the 
natural-born protector, at the same time as the regula- 
tor, of the spiritual power. With the logic of his mind, 
it did not take him long thoroughly to modify his con- 
clusions on all points. He called himself a Mosaic 
radical, a disciple of Moses, so as to indicate at the 
same time the fundamental conservatism of those ad- 
vanced opinions and their Biblical origin. It was not 
the first time that the Old Testament was responsible 
for a transformation of this sort: did not Voltaire say 
irreverently of a prophet whose freedom of speech the 
Socialists of our day would scarcely equal : ' ' That wag 
Amos is capable of anything ?^^ 

Among the new opinions which Manning drew from 
his new religion, we ought to place his love for Ireland 
in the first rank. He began by venerating in her the 
Island of Saints and the Land of Martyrs, watered by 



192 purcell's ''manning" refuted. 

the blood which England, associating the spirit of per- 
secution with that of domination, has made to flow in 
torrents there. Though he had denounced Fenianism, 
as well as all secret societies, as a sin, it did not take 
him long, in his daily relations, intimate and familiar 
with a race that formed the immense majority of his 
flock, to entertain towards it that affection, at the 
same time enthusiastic and compassionate, which the 
Irish have never failed to inspire in those who know 
them. He was the first among Englishmen to adopt 
in his conscience the idea of Home Rule, that is, of 
limited autonomy, as the solution of a perhaps unsolv- 
able problem. When, in 1886, Gladstone rallied to a 
policy that he had honestly combated as long as he had 
been able to believe in the success of the only alterna- 
tive acceptable to a Liberal, that is, of the realization 
of a programme of organic reforms, Manning came close 
to his old friend, between whom and himself there had 
been a coolness since their controversy on Vaticanism. 
The Irish of the large cities adored him. On the 
annual feast day in honor of St. Patrick, whom he had 
made the patron of a drinkers^ truce, intended to snatch 
some victims from alcoholism, the Archbishop's name 
was received with loud applause. The day on which 
he celebrated the silver jubilee or twenty-fifth anniver- 
sary of his episcopate, all the Irish Nationalist Mem- 
bers of Parliament, Protestants and Catholics alike, 
with Parnell, a heretic, at their head, went to the 
Archbishop's House to offer him their congratulations. 
This proceeding was a subject of affliction to all those 
Catholics, — and they are numerous in England as 



MANNING AS A CATHOLIC. 193 

elsewhere, — who have not known how to distinguish 
the cause of God and of the Church from that of social 
order, from political conservatism and from legitimacy. 
It is true that, in his later years, Manning gave them 
so many causes for scandal that one more was scarcely 
important. Willingly would they have set down these 
pranks of the Cardinal to the account of age and the 
isolation in which he was ever more and more confin- 
ing himself; but Manning's vigorous appearance when 
he officiated, the brilliancy of his eagle look, the 
majesty of his bearing, the indefatigable sprightliness 
of his mind forbade those perfidious allusions to 
apoplexy of the Archbishop of Grenada. The Cardi- 
nal, in fact, reserved a much more disagreeable surprise 
for his detractors. In the closing years of his life he 
was going to preach by word and act that doctrine of 
Catholic socialism, or rather of social Catholicism, 
which is indeed the most hateful of the novelties that 
can excite the wrath of those of the faithful accustomed 
to see in the Church the guardian of their interests and 
in religion the best safeguard of property. 

Novelties? I am in error, for one of Manning's merits 
was precisely to throw new light on the teaching of 
Catholicism on these essential points, and to borrow 
from St. Thomas Aquinas, whose wisdom enlightened 
by revelation is no more defective on this chapter than 
on the others, the fruitful principles of a social science 
that is not vitiated by the materialism of its premises 
and by the partiality of its deductions. I can give only 
a very light sketch of the many and remarkable writ- 
ings which the Cardinal devoted to this subject, either 
13 



194 purcell's ''manning" refuted. 

in the form of articles in the great reviews, or of con- 
troversial letters in the columns of the Times, or even 
in that of pastoral letters. His theory rested on a few 
very simple general ideas. To him political economy 
was a moral science, and the conclusions of the abstract 
study of wealth had no value but in so much as they 
were subordinate to the universal laws of conscience. 
In his estimation labor, too long relegated to the rear 
and deprived of the protection of which it stood so 
urgently in need, ought to be treated on the same foot- 
ing as capital had been. The only economic unity, the 
essential social quality, was man, the human individual, 
with his physical and moral needs, his aspirations, his 
rights. The end of society was by no means the pro- 
duction of wealth, but the acquiring of the greatest 
possible happiness for the greatest number under the 
empire of the moral law. Among the social axioms 
there was none more chimerical, according to him, than 
to promulgate the pretended dogma of ''let alone" or 
of the non-interference of the State. The whole econo- 
mic history of mankind had consisted in violating this 
so-called principle, it is true, especially to the advant- 
age of the capitalists. In our time, the labor-protecting 
legislation to which Lord Shaftesbury has so gloriously 
attached his name, had begun to restore equilibrium. 
Manning deemed it so much the more deplorable to 
stop in this course under the pretext of a worship to be 
paid to the fictions of a certain political economy, as 
there was still an enormous amount of work to be done 
in this direction and as justice is no less interested than 
the security of society in the continuance of this under- 
taking. 



MANNING AS A CATHOLIC. 195 

Since 1873 Manning had been inspired with these 
ideas that were so much the bolder at that date, as 
German pulpit socialism had hardly begun to accord its 
patronage to the founding of Trades Unions among 
agricultural laborers by Joseph Arch. A conference 
that he gave in 1877, on the rights and dignity of labor, 
contained the explanations of these principles. In it 
he sketched that social organization, the presentiment 
of w4iich was haunting him and which, in many of its 
characteristics, partakes of the nature of the guilds of 
former times. While utterly repudiating sympathy 
with revokitionary ideas, therein he clearly concluded 
in favor of fixing by law the normal duration of a day's 
work and, after having pictured some of the effects of 
unlimited competition and of the unbridled play of 
supply and demand, he closed with the declaration 
that these things cannot — they should not — last. The 
piling up of enormous wealth like mountains, in the 
hands of certain classes, or of certain individuals, must 
continue indefinitely unless a remedy is applied to the 
condition of the people. Society cannot rest on such 
foundations. In a pastoral letter of 1880 he pointed 
out the existence, in the heart of our great cities, not 
of poverty, which is an honorable condition, but of 
pauperism, which is its corruption and the degradation 
of the poor; and he painted in the darkest colors those 
inequalities of our social condition, those abysses dug 
between classes, those abrupt contrasts between those 
whose lot is luxury and those whose destiny is wretch- 
edness. In his articles in the Conteviporary, the Fort- 
nightly RevieWy the Nineteenth Century^ in his letters to 



196 purcell's ''manning" refuted. 

the Times, he receded neither from bold thoughts nor 
from rash words. His right to steal, grafted on the right 
to work and to assistance, though in reahty borrowed 
from the most orthodox theology of the Church, was 
well calculated, no doubt with premeditation, to startle 
every economist. Besides, none the more did Manning 
recoil from compromising relations than from ideas 
that were looked at unfavorably. The famous Ameri- 
can socialist, Henry George, the leaders of the new 
trades-unionism, the Tom Manns, the Ben Tilletts, the 
John Burnses, received a cordial welcome at the Arch- 
bishop's House. This house had become the meeting 
place, not only of the clergy and of the faithful of his 
diocese, but of a multitude of dreamers, agitators, re- 
formers, nay even revolutionists, who, having come on 
the first occasion as visitors, sometimes returned as 
penitents. Manning, through his League of the Cross, 
through his relations with the Irish, had come in direct 
contact with the people, with the laboring classes. It 
was in that direction that he wanted the Church to 
turn. He felt that for him to seek to lean on govern- 
ments or on the directing classes, was to court cruel 
disillusions. When Pope Leo XIII. sent a special 
delegate, Mgr. Persico, to study the question of the 
Plan of Campaign and of the land agitation in Ireland, 
the Archbishop of Westminster regretted that he had 
entered into communication with the Ministers and 
the landlords instead of going direct to the people 
and of consulting the Nationalist M. P.'s, the patriotic 
clergy and the bishops. With all his power at Rome 
he supported the cause of Archbishop Gibbons, of Bal- 



MANNING AS A CATHOLIC. 197 

timore, when the latter was accused of favoring Social- 
ism and of being too indulgent to the Knights of Labor. 
In fine and especially, he exerted a decisive influence 
in the great strike on the London Docks in the months 
of August and September, 1889. 

That episode in the war between labor and capital 
was of great importance. It was the mobilizing of the 
lower layer of the laboring classes, of that unskilled 
labor which had remained until then outside the ranks 
of trades-unionism. AVith these elements, there was 
reason to fear that, in the London atmosphere over- 
charged with electricity, the strike might degenerate 
into a genuine civil war. Fortunately the dock labor- 
ers had level-headed men for their leaders. Burns, 
Mann, Tillett, and they obeyed them with admirable 
discipline. It was only sixteen days after the begin- 
ning of the struggle that the Cardinal was called upon 
to unite his efforts with those of the men who were try- 
ing to bring about conciliation. In an interview with 
the directors he entreated them to yield on the ques- 
tion of salary in the name of their interests, of the 
imminence of a revolution, and especially of the suffer- 
ings of the poor. A committee was formed with the 
Lord Ma3^or as chairman, on which sat the Cardinal, 
the Anglican bishop of London, who very soon repudi- 
ated responsibilities that were too heavy for him, Mr. 
Sidney Buxton and some others. It was on Manning 
and Buxton that the whole weight of the negotiations 
fell. Convinced of the justice of the chief claim.s made 
by the strikers, they exerted themselves with rare 
energy to obtain liberal concessions from the managers. 



198 purcell's '^manning" refuted. 

A compromise was suggested: the laborers were to ob- 
tain the amount of wages that they asked, — the famous 
tanner J or twelve cents an hour; but the new tariff was 
to go into effect only on March 1, 1890, that is, after a 
delay of six months. Burns and Tillett declared that it 
would be impossible to accept such a long wait for their 
comrades; Manning exerted himself strenuously to ob- 
tain the date of January 1 from the directors. It was 
the final limit of their concessions. There was question 
of gettfng the transaction sanctioned by the strikers, 
who were already accusing their leaders of treason. 
The Cardinal, accompanied by Mr. Buxton, betook 
himself to the Dockers' headquarters, in the favorite 
Poplar district. A meeting was held in the school hall 
of the Catholic church in Kirby street. The audience 
were boisterous. All those strikers were for the first 
time tasting the fruits of solidarity. They believed 
that they were sure of victory. To ask them to wait 
for more than three months for the clear and full result 
of those weeks of privations and sacrifices, was to 
appeal to reason against instinct in beings who were in 
their first movement. On the other hand, the Cardinal, 
thoroughly satisfied as he was of the justice of their 
cause, knew that therein lay the only means of making 
it triumph, and that the directors were looking only for 
an excuse to recall their concessions. For nearly five 
hours — from five until ten o'clock in the evening — that 
old man of eighty-three, that prince of the Church, 
pleaded with familiar and impassioned eloquence in the 
interest of the laborers and of their families. In closing 
he drew tears from the driest eyes by making an 



MANNING AS A CATHOLIC. 199 

eloquent appeal to their love for their wives and chil- 
dren. His cause was won. The emotion was intense 
among those simple and rough men. One of them 
thought he saw the Madonna hanging over the orator's 
venerable head, giving a sign of approval. The real 
miracle was the conquest of those simple minds and of 
those rough hearts by that old priest who never served 
Christ better than by procuring peace on that occasion. 
It is on this closing scene that it is proper to leave 
Manning. There no longer remained to him but a few 
months to live. The shadows of evening were falling 
ever more thickly on his path. His health was too 
feeble to allow him to leave his residence in order to 
betake himself to that Athenaeum Club, where he was 
so fond of recreating himself in the society of a Rusk in, 
a Bryce, a Gladstone, or even of some Anglican prelate. 
Though surrounded by the love of the whole people, 
by the veneration of his Church, by some faithful 
affections, he felt himself isolated. His thoughts were 
naturally turning back towards the past. He gave 
himself up to a prolonged examination of conscience. 
He again passed over the course of his long life. He 
gave thanks to God for having revealed to him the 
plenitude of His truth. He humiliated himself for 
his errors and his faults. He enumerated to himself, 
when he felt discouraged by the comparison of his 
career with that of a Shaftesbury, of a Gladstone or of 
a Macaulay, the five great truths to which it had been 
given to him to do homage: the unity of the Church, 
the rule of divine faith, the infallibility of the Church 
and of its head, the ofiice of the Holy Ghost, the- tern- 



200 purcell's "manning" refuted. 

poral power of the Vicar of Jesus Christ — and also the 
three great causes to which he had devoted himself: 
the religious education of children, temperance, and the 
education of the clergy. A weariness of living was 
coming over him, but, at least, the fear of death never 
visited him. There are men, he said, who do not like to 
speak of their end. As for him, he liked to do so, as it 
aids in preparing oneself and it takes away all sorrow 
and all fright. It is a good thing to be filled with the 
thought of the light and beauty of the world beyond 
the grave. That is what inspired St. Paul with his 
desire to rove. This simple, candid, radiant faith was 
indeed the feeling that was to accompany and facilitate 
that great Christian's death. For nearly two years he 
serenely saw his weakness increase. In the beginning 
of the 3'ear 1892 he understood that the last hour had 
struck. After an illness of six days, he received the 
last sacraments and made his solemn profession of faith 
in the presence of the Westminster chapter, on January 
13. During his last night he was watched by three 
friends, namely. Bishop Vaughan, his successor; Canon 
Johnson, his secretary, and Dr. Gasquet, his physician. 
At dawn on the 14th, whilst Bishop Vaughan was say- 
ing Mass for him in his oratory, the soul of Henry 
Edward Manning, Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, 
was called back to its God. 

Almost at the same time there died a young prince 
in the direct line of succession to the throne of England, 
the Duke of Clarence. This national mourning did 
not detract from the great outburst of sorrow that ac- 
companied the disappearance of this octogenarian. 



I 



MANNING AS A CATHOLIC. 201 

One would have said that the London of the laborer, 
of the people, of the poor, felt itself orphaned. In the 
multitude that defiled in close ranks into the mortuary 
chapel in which were exposed the mortal remains of 
the Archbishop, clad in the Cardinal's purple, were to 
be seen, alongside of his colleagues in the episcopate, 
of the members of his clergy, of the laity of his flock, 
of the neophytes whom he had brought into the Church, 
of the penitents whose director he was, of the friends 
whom he received, with his customary good grace, and 
of the individualities of every sort, of every opinion and 
of every origin, who had tasted his generous and toler- 
ant hospitality, an anonymous multitude, in part de- 
cently clad, partly haggard and raggy, that had come 
to see for the last time the emaciated features of the 
patron of the poor, of the people's Cardinal. His 
funeral took place on January 21st at the Brompton 
Oratory. In that vast sanctuary were assembled to pay 
the last honors to him all the representatives of the 
Church, of the aristocracy, of politics, of the directing 
classes. It was outside that the most imposing mani- 
festation took place. The streets were filled with 
dense masses of people. The League of the Cross with 
its banners, the Irish National League, the Temperance 
Alliance of the United Kingdom, the London Trades 
Unions, the dock laborers' societies, the Good Templars, 
the Bands of Mercj^ groups of children, religious con- 
fraternities, political associations, workingmen's corpo- 
rations, the grand army of toilers, and, behind, in still 
closer files, that other great army of the wretched who 
ordinarily come out into the light only in the dark 



202 purcell's "manning" refuted. 

hours 01 trouble and storm — that variegated multitude 
formed the hedge along the march from the Oratory to 
the cemetery. At several points bands of music played 
funeral marches. When the coffin passed, all that 
multitude, Catholics and Protestants, socialists and 
revolutionists, knelt or bowed. One would have said 
that, for one day, over that casket in which slept a 
great servant of Christ, the two worlds, between which 
our materialist and mercantile civilization has dug an 
abyss, extended their hands to each other weeping and 
were reconciled in a common mourning. 

Such were the obsequies of Henry Edward Manning, 
cardinal priest of the holy Roman Church, of the title 
of Sts. Gregory and Andrew on Mt. Coelius, Archbishop 
of Westminster, primate of England. Our age has no 
doubt seen more pompous: it has seen none more affect- 
ing. It was truly a whole people that was partaking 
in them. Manning needs no other funeral oration. 

I have tried to tell the story of his life: that long 
effort in the direction of truth, that heroic sacrifice of 
all that is dear to man, that passion for certitude which 
cast him at the feet of the infallible Church and, in 
that Church, at the feet of the Vicar of Jesus Christ, 
the incorruptible guardian of the deposit of faith. I 
have tried to tell also of that noble attempt to bring 
mankind to the Church, and to give to the Church con- 
sciousness of its mission of enfranchisement, of conso- 
lation and of salvation for society as well as for the 
individual. In the presence of that grand figure, made 
up of austerity and of love, of asceticism and of charity, 
in the presence of the memory of that man who loved 



MANNING AS A CATHOLIC. 203 

power, but only to devote it to the noblest of uses, the 
word that involuntarily rises to the lips to sum up all 
that history is that of Scripture : Ecce sacerdos magnus; 
his was truly the soul of a priest. 



INDEX. 



Accademia dei Nobili Ecclesias- 
tici, 134. 

Acton, Cardinal, 34; Sir John and 
Lord, 177. 

Aix-la Chapelle, 121. 

Allen, Cardinal, 34. 

America, Liberty in, 180. 

Amos the Prophet, 191. 

Anderdon, John, 25. 

Anglican Church, 48, 67, 72, 93, 
99, 103, 113, 114, 122, 136, 138, 
160, 162 ; Overtures to Rome, 
67 ; clergy adversely criticised, 
94; communion, 28; episco- 
pate, 42 ; formalism, 94; Jesuit, 
22; period of Manning's life, 
34, 70-132 ; Pharisaism, 95 ; 
position. Manning's doubts of, 
28; reunion, 160; revival, 94; 
schism, 162 ; spirit, 27 ; the- 
ology, 91. 

Anglicans, 154, 162, 164. 

Anglicanism, 48, 49, 63, 66, 71, 

72, 96, 101, 103, 105, 107, 111, 
113, 121, 123, 129, 131, 132, 
133, 136, 161. 

Anglo-Catholic movement, .out- 
come of, 63, 72, 91, 95, 115. 
Anglo-Catholicism, 8, 23, 49, 63, 

73, 74. 75, 78, 97, 106, 110, 
113, 125, 128, 162, 164. 

Anti-dogmatism, 57. 

Antiquity, Catholic, 22. 

Antonelli, Cardinal, 152. 

"Apologia pro Vita Sua" (New- 
man's), 74, 85, 101, 168. 

Apostles and Sanhedrin, 130 ; the, 
158. 



Apostolic Letter " iTniversalis 

Ecclesiae," 137. 
Apostolic succession, 39, 62. 
Arch, Joseph, 195. 
Archdeacon of Chichester, 107, 

110, 123. 
Aristides the Just, 21. 
Arnold, Matthew, 55. 
Assisi, Portiuncula of, 121. 
Athenaeum Club, 199. 
Augsburg " Gazette," 172. 
Austen, Jane, on Anglican clergy, 

94. 
Austin, Mrs., 33. 
" Avenir," the, 171. 

Babylonian Captivity, Newman's 

theory of the, 104. 
Balliol College, Oxford, 82. 
Baltimore, 196. 
Bands of Mercy, 201. 
BanK of England, 84. 
Barnabo, Cardinal, 35, 139, 145, 

148, 153. 
Bartolini, Cardinal, 182. 
Basel, Cathedral of, 121. 
Bayle, 77. 

Bayswater, 141, 155. 
Beckx, S. J., Father General, 134. 
Benedictines, 140. 
Benjamin, H. E. Manning as a, 81. 
Berlin, Bismarck and Odo Russell 

at, 177. 
Bevan, Miss, turns Manning to 

Evangelicalism, 85, 120. 
Bible, 41, 52, 53, 54, 68. 
Bible Commentary, Scott's, 85. 
Bible Society, 85. 



(205) 



206 



INDEX. 



Bilio, Cardinal, 1^3, 178, 179, 182. 

Birmingham, Newman at Oratory 
near, 70, 152, 156. 

Bismarck and Odo Russell, 177. 

Bizzari, Cardinal, 173. 

Blomfield, Bishop, on Manning, 
110. 

Bristol, English Church Union at, 
66. 

" British Critic," 105. 

British Isles, the Church in the, 
91. 

Brompton Oratory, 172, 201. 

Brotherhood of Christ, 43. 

Brovvnbill, Rev. Father, 132. 

Buckingham Palace Road Chapel, 
131. 

Bull, Anglican theologian, 91. 

Bunsen and the Jerusalem bishop- 
ric, 105. 

Burgon, Dean, 15. 

Burns, John, 196, 197, 198. 

Buxton, Sidney, 197, 198. 

Bryce, James, 199. 

Byron at Oxford, 83. 

Byronism, 87. 

Calvinism, 128. 

Calvinist biographer of Manning, 

4 ; Calvinists, 115. 
Cam, the, 83. 
CamlDridge, 128 ; University's 

rivalry with Oxford, 82, 83 ; 

Catholics and, 162, 177. 
Campagna, Roman. 176. 
Canterbury, 126, 130. 
Capel, Mgr.. 163. 
Cardinals, College of, 35 ; do., 

English since Reformation, 34. 
Carlyle, Fronde's life of, 3, 80. 
Caterini, Cardinal, 173. 
Catholic antiquity, 22. 
Catholic ceremonies, 65. 
Catholic chaplain in the army, 

139. 
Catholic Church, 27, 57, 63, 65, 

67, 113, 124, 179. 



Catholic Emancipation, 33, 96. 

Catholic evolution, 61. 

Catholic historian, 19. 

Catholic, Manning's life as a, 29, 
133-203. 

Catholic peoples and Protestant 
peoples, 17. 

Catholic system, living unity of 
the, 50, 65, 102. 

Catholic University in Dublin, 
163; Kensington, 163. 

Catholicism, 9, 12, 15, 17, 32, 37, 
38, 40, 42, 44, 45, 48, 49, 62, 
63, 67, 70,72,76, 85,86, 90,91, 
98, 101, 103, 107, 109, 114, 115, 
118, 120, 121, 124, 125, 135, 
136, 137, 140, 142, 144, 145, 
146, 147, 151, 152, 158, 159, 
160, 161, 165, 180, 193. 

Catholicizing dilettantism, 18. 

Catholicizing evolution, 41. 

Catholics, two classes of, in Eng- 
land, 137, 154. 

Chair of Peter, 113, 120. 

Charles I. and Parliament, 91. 

Chelsea, sage of, 80. 

Chichester, Archdeacon of, 49, 
107, 110, 123, 128; diocese of, 
not Oxford, 106. 

Chinese Wall, 47. 

Christ, 68 ; brotherhood of, 43. 

Christendom, 61, 65, 153, 160, 
165, 172. 

Christian life, ideal of, 62. 

"Christian Remembrancer," 111. 

Christian skeptic, Newman as a, 
38. 

Christian socialism, 42. 

" Christian Year," Keble's, 97. 

Christians, 60 ; and philosophers, 
57. 

Christianity, 10, 15, 17, 38, 41, 
42, 44, 45, 50, 56, 62, 64, 67, 68, 
92, 146, 158, 159, 160. 

Church and State, Gladstone on, 
107. 

Church, the, 27, 28, 44, 45, 46, 



INDEX. 



207 



48, 49, 50, 57, 60, 62, 63, 64, 65, 
86, 91, 93, 96, 97, 99, 101, 130, 
147, 154, 160, 161, 172, 177, 
202. 

Church dechristianized, 43. 
Church, Fathers of the, 22. 
Church of Christ, 65 ; of England, 

49, 96, 131 ; of Rome, 12, 40, 
48, 49 ; and Anglican Church, 
67 ; of the Reformation, 57, 67. 

Church of England, 144; and in 

England, 191. 
Church's, Dean, sketch of Man- 
ning, 75. 
" Civilta Cattolica," 151, 172. 
Clarence, death of Duke of, 71, 

200. 
Clarendon, Lord, 176, 177. 
Clifford, Bishop of Clifton, 152, 

153, 154, 156. 
Coelius, Mt., 202. 
Coffin, Father, 136, 153. 
Coligny, 6Q. 

College of Cardinals, 35. 
Colonial Office, Manning in, 84, 

87. 
Communion of Saints, 65. 
"Confessions of St Augustine," 

74. 
Consistory of March 15, 1875, 

35. 
" Contemporary Review," 195. 
Council of the Vatican, 35 ; of 

Trent, 101, 172. 
Court of Arches, 126. 
Court of Rome, 164, 168. 
Court, the, 22, 26, 185. 
Crimean War, 139. 
Crystal Palace, 187. 

Dalgairns, Father, 112, 136. 
Dante, 132 ; his Hell outdone in 

London, 183. 
Darwinian, 55. 

Disraeli, 112; on Manning, 165. 
Dockers' strike, London, 198. 
Doellinger, 170, 173, 175. 



Dominick, Father, receives New- 
man into the Catholic Church, 

105, 110. 
Douay, 136. 
Downing street, 23. 

Dublin, Newman and Catholic 

University in, 163. 
Dupanloup, Bishop, 170, 172, 173, 

174, 178. 

East End resorts of London, 183. 

Ecclesiastical Titles bill, 138. 

Edgbaston Oratorian, 31, 163, 
169. 

Edict of Nantes, 135. 

Eliot, George, on Anglican clergy, 
94. 

Elizabeth, Queen, 127, 135. 

Emancipation, Catholic, 33. 

Encyclical " Satis Cognitum," 67, 
161. 

England, Church of, 49, 99 ; in, 
154, 174, 177; Liberty in, 180. 

English Cardinals since the Refor- 
mation, 34. 

English Catholicism, 32, 38. 

English Church, 28; Church 
Union, 66 ; people, 42 ; Refor- 
mation, 127. 

Erastianism, 92. 

Errington, Coadjutor, 30, 143, 
145, 149, 151, 152, 153, 154, 
155. 

Established Church, 88, 91. 

Eton, 81. 

Eucharistic sacrifice, 63. 

Evangelical party and Manning, 

106, 110. 
Evangelicalism, 93, 94, 95, 96, 

98 ; claimed iDOth Newman and 

Manning, 85. 
Exeter, Bishop of, on Manning, 

111 ; Gorham case, 126. 
Expiation, Christ of the, 61. 

Faber, Father, 134, 136, 139. 
Farm street, London, 156. 



208 



INDEX. 



Fatherhood of God, 43. 

Fathers of the Church, 22. 

Fenelon, 151. 

Fenianism, 192. 

Fielding on Anglican clergy, 94. 

Forster Education Act, 189. 

'■ Fortnightly Review," 195. 

France and the Vatican Council, 
ITS, 178. 

France, Reformation in, 16 ; Man- 
ning in, 121, 150, IVO, 111. 

Franchi, Cardinal, 182. 

Franke, 66. 

French Legitimists, 136; Revolu- 
tion, 136 ; Priests in exile, 136. 

Froude, J. A., " Carlyle," 3, 79; 
"History of England," 76; R. 
H., 75, 76, 97 ; on Newman, 
168. 

Fry, Mrs., 122. 

Fulda, German bishops at, 173. 

Gallicanism, 137, 142, 154, 165, 
Gasquet, Dr., 200. 
Gasquet's "Life of Manning," 20. 
Geneva, 14, 102; Rome and, 67, 

108. 
" Genie de Christianisme," 159. 
George, Henry, 196. 
German, 177. 
Germany, 170 ; and Vatican 

Council, 173, 178. 
Gibbons, Cardinal, 64, 183, 196. 
Gladstone, Mr., 79, 82, 83, 84, 

106, 107, HI, 112, 116, 118, 

128, 129, 130, 131, 176, 177, 

181, 192, 199. 
God, fatherhood of, 43. 
Goderich, Lord, 84. 
"Golden-mouthed Samuel" Wil- 

berforce, 82. 
Good Templars, 201. 
Gorham, Rev. George C, 126, 

127. 
Gospel, 55, 68, 86. 
Grandison, Cardinal, of "Lo- 

thair," 165. 



Grant, Bishop, 141, 152, 153, 156, 

174. 
Gratry, Pere, 170. 
Grenada, Archbishop of, 193. 
Guizot, M., and Manning, 174. 
Gunpowder Plot, 110. 

Halifax, Lord, 66, 67. 

Hallam, Arthur, 83. 

Hampden, professor of theology, 

103; bishop, 122, 123. 
Hanover, house of, 92. 
Harrow school, 81. 
Henry VIIL, 127, 135. 
Hero of charity, 47. 
Hierarchy restored in England, 

138. 
Holy Ghost, temporal role of the, 

40, 50; Apostle of the, 157. 
Holy See, 142, 144, 148, 150, 151, 

154, 171. 
Home Rule, 192. 

Hooker, Anglican theologian, 91. 
Hope Scott, 111, 128, 131. 
Houghton, Lord, 83. 
House of Commons, 84. 
Howard, Cardinal, 34. 
Huguenots, 57. 
Hume's skepticism, 56. 
Hutton's " Life of Manning," 20. 

Ignatius of Loyola, Institute of, 

139. 
Incarnation, 61. 
Index, the, 151. 
Individualism, 61. 
Infallibility, Papal, 35, 1^5, 169, 

178. 
Inquisition, 14. 
Ireland, 191. 
Irish immigrants, 135 ; Catholics, 

136; Nationalists, 192, 196, 201. 
Isis, the, 83. 
Isle of Saints, 191. 
Isle of Wight, 89. 
Israel, history of, 53. 
Italian troops invade Rome, 179. 



INDEX. 



209 



J 



Italy, Newman's journey in, 92, 
121. 

Jansenism and Anglo-Catholic- 
ism, 73. 

Jebb, Bishop, 98. 

Jerusalem, 68 ; bishopric of, 105. 

Jesuit, 22 ; Jesuits, 134, 15G, 173 ; 
Jesuitism, 167. 

Jesus Clirist, 40, 44, 53, 54, 55 ; 
Vicar of, 72. 

Johnson, Canon, 200. 

Jouflfroy, 39. 

" Journal Religieux de la Suisse 
Romande," 11. 

Judseo-Christian diplomacy, 54. 

Justification, Christ of the, 61 ; 
by faith, 53. 

Kant's criticism, 56. 

Keble, 128 ; life of, 75 ; sessional 

sermon by, 74; "Christian 

Year" by, 97. 
Kensington, Catholic University 

School, 163. 
King, Miss Harriet, 80. 
Kingsley's attack on Newman, 74, 

168. 
Knights of Labor, 197. 
Knox, Alexander, 98. 
Kulturkampf, 170. 

Lacordaire, 170. 
Lamennais, 39, 171. 
Laprimaudaye, Rev. Mr., 117. 
Laud, Archbishop, 91. 
Lavington, Manning Vicar at, 88 ; 

rector of, 89, 110, 130. 
League of the Cross, 1 86, 187, 201. 
Legitimists, French, 135. 
Leo Xlir., 45; his Letter "Ad 

Anglos," 67 ; 168, 171, 182, 183, 

196. 
Leo the Great, Pope, 180. 
"Letters" of Newman, 101. 
Liberalism, 15, 71, 147, 150, 169, 

173. 

14 



Liberals, 96 ; Liberal Catholics, 

164, 167, 171. 
Liege, Cathedral of, 121. 
Lincoln College, Oxford, 76. 
Littlemore, 105, 110, 111, 112, 

129. 
Liverpool, 135. 
Lockhart, Father, 111. 
London, 80, 135, 158, 183 ; Docks 

strike, 197. 
" Lothair," Cardinal Manning in, 

165. 
Louis XIV., 177. 
Luther, 66 ; Church of, 65. 
Lutherans, 115. 

Macaulay on Anglican Clergy, 
94; on Gladstone, 106, 199. 

Machiavelli, 22 ; Machiavellian- 
ism, 165. 

MacMuUen, Canon, 91. 

Maguire, Canon, 30. 

Maistre, Joseph de, 94, 159. 

Mann, Tom, 196, 197. 

Manning, Archbishop, 35 et pas- 
sim; Cardinal, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 11, 
12, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 24, 
25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 
33, 34, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 
42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 64, 
66, 67, 71, 75, 78, 79, 80 et 
passim. 

Manning, Henry Edwardj>birth of, 
80 ; at Harrow School, 81 ; with 
a private tutor, do.; at Balliol 
College, Oxford, 82 ; politics, 
Gladstone, Colonial Office, 84 ; 
religious influence of Miss Be- 
van, 85 ; Disturbed religiously, 
87 ; Antipathy to Established 
Church, 88 ; Ordination, do.; 
Vicar at Lavington, do.; Mar- 
ries Caroline Sargent, 89 ; Rec- 
tor of Lavington, do.; death of 
his wife, 90; Her memory, do.; 
His minor part in the Oxford 
movement prior to 1845, 105 ; 



210 



INDEX. 



Early relations with Newman, 
106 ; takes rank among the 
Tractarians, do.; First journey 
to Rome and meeting with 
Wiseman, 107 ; Archdeacon of 
Chichester, do.; never in full 
harmony with Newman, 108 ; 
Letter to Pusey and one from 
Wiseman, 109 ; His Protestant- 
ism in 1844, and Bishop Blom- 
field's opinion of him, 120; 
" Essay on the Unity of the 
Church," 111; Bishop Phill- 
post's opinion and Manning as 
a hope of Anglicanism, do., 
Newman's conversion, 112 ; 
Manning shaken in his Angli- 
canism, 113 ; Turning to Rome, 
114 ; Revelations of his diary, 
116 ; Going to confession as an 
Anglican, 117 ; Austerity of his 
life, 118; Spiritual renewal in 
ill health, 119; Growing con- 
viction of the truth of Catholi- 
cism, 120 ; Tour on the Conti- 
nent and sojourn in Rome, 120 ; 
Interview with Pius IX., 122 ; 
Attitude towards Hampden as 
Bishop, 123 ; Realizes the hol- 
lowness of Anglicanism, 124; 
The Gorhara Case, 126 ; Despair 
of Anglicanism, 128 ; Against 
the Royal Supremacy, 129 ; 
Agony of his Anglicanism, do.; 
On the eve of submission to 
Rome, 130 ; Restoration of the 
Catholic hierarchy and Man- 
ning's farewell to Anglicanism, 
131 ; Manning becomes a Cath- 
olic, 132 ; Decides on entering 
the priesthood, 133 ; Is ordained 
and studies in Rome, 134; Re- 
called to England, 135 ; Takes 
the Ultramontane side, 138 ; 
Founds the Oblates of St. 
Charles, 139; Difficulties with 
Bishop Grant, 141 ; Provost of 



Westminster, 142 ; Trouble 
with Coadjutor Bishop Erring- 
ton, 143 ; Manning made Pro- 
thonotary Apostolic, 144 ; Er- 
rington removed, 145 ; Man- 
ning's Ultramoutanism, 146 ; 
He defends the Temporal Power, 
150; Cardinal Wiseman's death, 
157; The succession, 152 ; Man- 
ning chosen, 155 ; Universally 
congratulatedj 156 ; Conse- 
crated, do.; Relations with Pius 
IX., dualism of his episcopal 
career, 159; Opposes corporate 
reunion, 160 ; Catholics and the 
Universities, 162 ; Manning and 
Newman in opposition, 165 ; 
Bandying words, 168; Preparing 
for the Vatican Council, 169 ; 
Stormy controversies, 172 ; 
Manning at the Council, 174; 
In the Pope's confidence, 175 ; 
Relations with Odo Russell, 
176 ; Voting on the decrees, 
178; Rome invaded, 179; Last 
relations with Pius IX., 180 ; 
Manning's conception of the Pa- 
pacy, 181 ; made a Cardinal, 
181 ; Becomes an apostle of 
charity, 183 ; Mansion House 
relief committee, 184; The 
League of the Cross, 186; Work- 
ing for the children, 188 ; Cru- 
sade against cruelty to children, 
190 ; Manning's politics, 191 ; 
Interest in the Irish, 192 ; An 
advocate of Christian socialism, 
193 ; Rights and dignity of 
labor, 195 : The London Docks 
strike, 197; The closing scene 
of Manning's activity, 199; 
Last illness and death, 200 ; 
Universal mourning and im- 
posing funeral, 201 ; His most 
fitting funeral oration, 202. 

Manning, Mrs., death of, 90, 91. 

Manning, William, the Cardinal's 



INDEX. 



211 



father, 80 ; fortune impaired, 

81 ; utterly ruined, 84. 
Maret, Mgr., on Infellibility, 173. 
Marriott, Charles, 75. 
Maurice, F. D., 111. 
Methodism, 92, 93. 
Middle Ages, the Church in the, 

101. 
Milan, San Sepulcro near, 139. 
Mill, Professor at Cambridge, 128. 
Monachisra, 65. 
Monaco, Cardinal, 182. 
Moncton Milnes (Lord Houghton), 

83. 
Montalembert, 170. 
Montalerabert, the Protestant, 15. 
Moorfield's Pro-Cathedral, 156. 
Morris, Father, 153. 
Mosaic radical. Manning as a, 191. 
Mozley, J. B. and Thomas, 75. 
Munich Cabinet, 177. 

Nantes, Edict of, 135. 

Napoleon III., 150, 177. 

National Church, 22. 

" Nemesis of faith " and J. A. 
Froude, 76. 

Neo-Catholicism, 62. 

Nessus tunic, 22. 

Newman, Francis, 76; in Persia, 
do.; His " Phases of Faith," do. 

Newman, Cardinal, 4, 31, 37, 38, 
41 ; Death of, 70 et seq.; Con- 
version of, 74 ; " Apologia," 74, 
75 ; His influence lost on some, 
75 ; Early education, 81 ; Con- 
trasted with Manning, 85 ; In- 
fluence of his conversion, 91 ; 
Italian journey, 97 ; His Evan- 
gelicalism and attitude towards 
Rome, 98 ; Starts the Tractarian 
movement, 99 ; Sermons at St. 
Mary's, Oxford, 100; Reveals 
himself in his "Apologia" and 
his " Letters," 101 ; Difficulties 
of his position, 101 ; His last 
agony as an Anglican, 103 ; He 



leaves Oriel and resigns from 
St. Mary's, 104 ; Retires to 
Littlemore and is received into 
the Catholic Church, 105 ; 
Manning never in absolute 
sympathy with him, 108: Opin- 
ions on Conversion of, 112; In 
favor of Catholics at the Uni- 
versities, 163 ; In opposition 
with Manning, 165 ; Bandying 
words, 168 ; Fronde's opinion 
of Newman, 168; Newman and 
the Vatican Council, 173, et 
passim. 

Nina, Cardinal, 182. 

"Nineteenth Century," 195. 

Non-conformism, Protestant, 49, 
96 ; Non-conformist Churches, 
63. 

Non-Jurors, the, 91. 

Norris, Cardinal, 34. 

Oakley. Canon, 112, 121, 136. 

Oates, Titus, 135. 

Oblates of St. Charles, 134, 141. 

O'Connell, 136. 

Old Catholicism, 170. 

Old Testament, 53. 

Ollivier-Daru Ministry, 173. 

O'Neal, Vicar-capitular, 156. 

Oratorian, 31, 101. 

Oratory, 134; of London, 130: 
Edgbaston, 163, 169; Brompton, 
172. 201, 202. 

Oriel College, Oxford, 73, 97, 99, 
100, 104. 

Orleans, Bishop of, 172, 174. 

Oxford, Bishop of, ordains Man- 
ning, 80 ; Samuel Witherforce, 
130 ; University of, 33, 73, 76, 
78, 82, 83, 84, 85, 97, 100, 104, 
105, 112; St. Mary's at, 41; 
Catholics and, 162, 164. 

Oxford Movement, 34, 37, 74, 86, 
91, 115, 136. 

"Pall Mall Gazette," 190. 



212 



INDEX. 



Palmerston, Lord, 152. 

Papacy, the, 150, 160, 172, 180. 

Papal bull restoring English 
hierarchy, 131. 

Papal Church, 63. 

Paris, Priest and Protestant 
pastor of, 66 ; in need of relief, 
184. 

Parliament, 22, 80 ; and Charles 
I., 91. 

Parliamentary reform in Eng- 
land, 74. 

Parnell, Mr., 192. 

Pascal, 66, 70, 93. 

Passaglia, Father, 134. 

Passionist Convent, Highgate, 
156. 

Pastoral letter of Manning, 1866, 
49. 

Patterson, Father, 153. 

Pattison, Mark, 76; "Memoirs," 
77. 

Pecci, Cardinal, elected Pope, 
182. 

Peel, Sir Robert, 33, 95. 

Pelagian, 122. 

Pentateuch, the, 53. 

Perrone, Father. 134. 

Persico, Mgr., 196. 

Peter healing the sick of Jerusa- 
lem, 68. 

Petrus Aurelius, 139. 

Pharisaism, Anglican, 95. 

Pharisees, 187. 

Phillpost, bishop of Exeter, on 
Manning, 111. 

Pius IX., Manning's relations 
with, 35, 122, 134, 137, 142, 
144, 148, 149, 153, 154, 155, 
157, 171, 175, 180, 182. 

Plan of Campaign, 196. 

Plymouth, 143. 

Pole, Cardinal, 34. 

Pope, the, 147, 150, 153. 

Popish Plot, 135. 

Porta Pia, breach of the, 179. 

Portiuncula, the, 121. 



Port-Royal, Sainte-Beuve's His- 
tory of, 73. 

Pressense, Edmond de, 15; in 
French Senate, 16; Francis de, 
4 ; Reported conversion of, 12, 
13 ; Declaration of principles, 
45 et seq. 

Priest and Protestant pastor, 66. 

Prince of Wales, 185. 

Privy Council in Gorham case, 

127, 130. 

Propaganda, 30, 35, 148, 150, 
153, 155. 

Protestant Nonconformism, 49 ; 
Protestant peoples and Catholic 
peoples, 17 ; Protestant prem- 
ises, 51 ; Protestant principles 
analyzed, 51. 

Protestantism, 9, 11, 15, 41, 46, 
48, 49, 51, 53, 63, 64, 65, 67, 
72, 76, 85, 86, 91, 92, 93, 94, 
98, 107, 100, 115, 125, 129, 
131,136, 140, 158, 161 ; Conti- 
nental, and Anglicanism, 105. 

Protestants, 164, 167. 

Pseudo Catholicism, 48. 

Purcell, E. S., 3, 11, 12, 17, 18, 
19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 
28, 29, 31, 33, 34, 35, 37, 38, 
77, 78, 79, 80, 88, 91, 108, 118, 
123, 126, 130, 164, 167; His 
chaotic style, 36. 

Puritanism, 91. 

Pusey, Dr., 33, 73, 75, 78, 95, 109, 

128, 130. 
Puseyites, 78. 

Quakers, 122. 

Queen, chaplain to the, 26. 

Quirinal, Vatican and, 179. 

Ravignan, Father de, 134. 
Reawakening, the, 51, 52. 
" Record (The)," and the Trac- 

tarians, 106. 
Redemption, 50, 53, 60, 61. 
Reform Act of 1832, 74. 



INDEX. 



213 



Reformation, 9, 12, 16, 34,46, 48, 
53, 61, 62,63, 64, 67, 70,99. 

Reformers, the, 54. 

Reign of Terror, 135. 

Reisach, Cardinal von, 173. 

Remusat, M. de, 93. 

Renan, 77. 

Revelation, 86. 

Revolution of 1688, 92. 

" Revue des Deux Mondes," 7. 

Ritual, 56. 

Ritualists, 41. 

Roman Catholicism, 115. 

Rome, Church of, 12, 40, 48, 49, 
102, 114; Agent of, 47; Court 
of, 29, 30 ; Manning's sojourn 
in, 1847-8, 120; 134, 149, 151, 
152, 172, 174; Invaded, 179. 

Rosebery, Lord, 179. 

Royal Supremacy, 127. 

Rugby, 81. 

Ruskin, John, 199. 

Russell, Lord John, 112, 138, 152, 
176. 

Russell, Odo, 152, 176. 

Sacred Book, 54 ; Sacred College, 

35 ; Sacred Scriptures, 52, 54. 
Sacrifice of the Cross, 65. 
Sage of Chelsea, 80. 
Saint-Cyran, 93, 139. 
Sainte-Beuve's " Port Royal," 73. 
Salvation Array, 187. 
Sanhedrin, Apostles and, 130. 
San Sepulcro near Milan, 139. 
Sargent, Rev. John, 88, his 

daughter Caroline becomes 

Manning's wife, 89. 
" Satis Cognitum," Encyclical, 

161. 
Savoy, House of, 180. 
Scherer, Edmond, 39, 52. 
Schleiermacher, 56. 
Scott's Bible Commentary, 85. 
Scriptures, the, 55, 62. 
Searle, Mgr., 143, 148, 153. 
Secretan, Charles, 58, 64. 



Seeley, Sir John, 177. 

Shaftesbury, Lord, 64, 66, 183, 
184, 194, 199. 

Shelley at Cambridge, 83. 

" Soapy Sara " Wilberforce, 82. 

Socialism, Christian, 42, 193. 

Society of Jesus, 131, 140. 

Solferino, 150. 

Southwark, 141, 152, 156. 

Sovereign Pontiff, the, 40. 

"Spectator (The)," 28. 

St. Augustine, 66, 74, 93. 

St. Bartholomew de Martyribus, 
157. 

St. Charles Borromeo, 139, 157. 

St. Edmund's College, 141, 148. 

Sts. Gregory and Andrew, 202. 

St. Ignatius, 134. 

St. John, 54. 

St. Martin's Summer of Neo- 
Catholicism, 62. 

St. Mary's at Oxford, 41, 104. 

St. Paul, 200. 

St. Peter, 172. 

St. Peter's, Rome, 121. 

St. Teresa, 84. 

St. Thomas Aquinas, 134, 193. 

St. Vincent de Paul, 66. 

St. Vincent Ferrier, 157. 

St. Vincent of Lerins, 99, 101. 

Stead, W. T., on Purcell's work, 
3 ; exposing evils, 190. 

Strafford, Earl of, 91. 

Strossmyer, Bishop, 178. 

Stuarts, dynasty of the, 91. 

"Summa" of St. Thomas, 134. 

Sumner, Archbishop of Canter- 
bury, 130. 

Sunderland, precocious and 
blasted, 83. 

Syllabus, the, 165. 

Talbot, Mgr. George, 29, 144, 149. 

153, 157. 
Temperance Alliance, 201. 
Temporal power, 165. 
Tennyson's " In Memoriam," 83. 



214 



INDEX. 



Terror, revolutionary, 135. 

Thames Docks strike, 37. 

Theopneustics, 52. 

Thiers. M., and Manning, 174, 

Tiber, the, 153. 

Tillet, Ben, 196, 197, 198. 

" Times," The, 132, 194, 196. 

Tories, 80, 85 ; Toryism, Gladstone 
and, 106 ; Manning as a Tory, 
191. 

" Tract No. 90," 22, 74, 103, 110. 

Tractarianisra, 34, 102; Tractar- 
ians not Puseyites, 78 ; Man- 
ning takes rank among, 106. 

" Tracts for the Times," 74, 98, 
105. 

Trades Unions, 195, 201. 

Trebizond, 31, 143, 149. 

Trent, Council of, 101, 172. 

Twistleton,Mr.,24. 

Ullathorne, Bisnop, 152, 153, 156. 

Ultramontane, 9, 42, 46, 137, 142, 
147 ; Ultramontantsm, 145, 146, 
158. 

" Univers," the "Record," a Pro- 
testant, 106 : "Univers," 192. 

" Universalis Ecclesiae," Apostolic 
Letter, 137. 

University of Oxford, 22, 23. 

Vatican, the, 150, 152, 175, 179. 
Vatican Council, 147, 170, 174, 

176, 178. 
"Vaticanism," Gladstone's, i81, 

192. 
Vaughan, Father, 157 ; Cardinal, 

77, 190, 200. 



Ventura, Father, 122. 

Veuillot, Louis, 176. 

Vicar of Jesus Christ, 72, 138, 146, 

171, 200, 202. 

Vincent of Lerins, St , 99, 101. 
Vinet, Alexandre, 15, 66. 
Voltaire, 191. 

Wales, Prince of, 185. 

Ward, W. G., 74, 75, 103, 107, 
108, 112, 136, 137. 

Waugh, Rev. Benjamin, 190. 

Weld, Cardinal, 34. 

Wellington, Duke of, 33, 81, 96. 

Wertherism, 87. 

Wesley, John, 92, 93. 

Westminster, Archbishop of, 20, 
21, 31, 34, 42, 49, 141, 142, 
148, 151, 155, 164, 167, 169, 

172, 174, 178, 179, 182, 183, 
184, 196. 200. 

Whigs, 95, 176. 

Wilberforce the philanthropist, 
94; Henry, 75, 106, 128; Ro- 
bert, 75, li6, 117, 128, 129; 
Samuel, 26, 82, 89, 119, 130. 

William of Orange, 110. 

Williams, Isaac, 75. 

Winchester, 81. 

Wiseman, Cardinal, 29, 30, 34, 
107, 109, 132, 134, 136, 138^ 
139, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 
148, 151, 152, 155, 157, 160, 
188. 

York, Cardinal, 34. 

Zwinglianism, 128. 



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